Texas Rangers World Series Prize Comes to Little Old Us

We sang Hosanna and brought out the incense for a very special guest who stopped by our office on Monday.

The Texas Rangers World Series trophy. We no longer covet our baseball neighbors’ trophies. We have one of our own and it came to visit us so our friends – and us, of course – could take pictures with it.

No touching or cuddling was allowed, although some of us did sing a few sweet songs. The Rangers have driven some of us crazy over the years, so why stop now?

“One guy tried to pick it up,” Cheryl Springer says of an overzealous fan in Arlington. “I grabbed him by the arms and said, ‘Put it down.'”

Soon the story came out that she had “taken him to the ground and all that stuff.”

“That makes the story better,” she says, laughing.

Springer and Jeff Holman, in my opinion, have the greatest job of all. They are the trophy handlers – the trophy coordinators – and they take the trophy from place to place so that the team’s fans can share in the glory of the World Series. The home team earned the bling by beating the Arizona Diamondbacks in the World Series by a score of four to one.

They typically make two or three stops a day, Holman says. The Rangers focus on areas where people buy tickets and rely on market analysis to collect data. They came to us because, well, we have friends.

The trophy weighs approximately 30 pounds, is made of sterling silver, and features 30 24-karat gold-plated flags representing each of the 30 teams in Major League Baseball. The center of the trophy is engraved with latitude and longitude lines symbolizing the world, and above that is 24-karat gold stitching representing a baseball.

Typically, about 200 to 300 fans stop by each stop to watch and take photos, Holman says. Holman says they have a date in Fort Worth next week where 1,200 are expected. He and Springer plan to head there later Monday to do some prep work to ensure a good flow of visitors and protect the Holy Grail.

The trophy is present at every home game, accompanied by Springer and Holman, stopping at suites before ending up in stadium announcer Chuck Morgan’s office for fans to see.

Springer and Holman also handle almost all of the scheduling. The furthest they’ve traveled is Oklahoma City, but trips to Shreveport and the Rangers’ farm teams in North Carolina are also on the agenda. They’ve been pulled from upcoming trips to Cooperstown for Adrian Beltre’s induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame and the World Series champion’s traditional trip to the White House.

As sporting competition teaches us so well, you cannot win all all the time.

Springer is an Arlington native and a longtime Rangers security guard. She even owns a World Series ring.

Holman is a retired police officer. He left the Fort Worth Police Department in February after 32 years of pursuing crime. He retired as a sergeant in the Electronic Surveillance Unit.

He owes his World Series fame to the motto “The early bird catches the worm.” As always, he got up early one morning with his dogs. He turned on the television to find out what had happened in the world overnight.

“I was watching ‘Fox and Friends’ one morning and (the host) was talking about (the Rangers) looking for a trophy coordinator,” he says. “I thought, ‘That sounds pretty good.'”

He had been retired for a few months and was looking for something to do, right?

“Not really. Maybe just something to keep busy. My wife works from home and I think I started to annoy her a little bit. So she was like, ‘Hey, can you do something?'”

Holman’s police career began with a near speeding ticket on Hulen Street. When Holman graduated from Southwest High School in 1986, he was caught speeding. Allegedly. Nevertheless, he was pardoned and told to go away and stop sinning.

One of the reserve officers knew Holman’s sister. That traffic stop blossomed into a friendship and a career in law enforcement. The next day, Officer Chip Jones, one of the officers who uncovered Holman’s Camaro, called and invited Holman, who owned a window tinting business at the time, to accompany him during his Saturday shift. That led to more trips and even more curiosity.

“I just became addicted,” he says.

He served as a reserve officer for three years before graduating from the academy in 1993.

He spent his first 13 years on patrol before starting to advertise. A shooting incident in 2001 “accelerated the process by wanting to get off the streets and into an office.”

Today, he guards Major League Baseball’s most valuable asset, in the hands of the team he has been a fan of since he was a child.

“It’s fun.”