DALLAS — Sometime in the summer of 2010, The Ticket sports radio personality Sean Bass - a noted Rangers superfan - made an on-air proclamation.
If the Rangers won the World Series that year, he would get the team's title-clinching box score tattooed on his back.
It took 14 years, but Bass, who now hosts The Sweet Spot from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. on 1310 AM/96.7 FM The Ticket, stuck to his word. The Rangers stumbled in 2010 and 2011 (which stung more than any tattoo), and then wandered through the baseball wilderness for more than a decade.
But when Texas finally won it all this past November, Bass knew what he had to do.
The Game 5 clincher was going on his back - in permanent ink.
"There was no getting out of it," Bass said. "It was a dumb claim by a 28-year-old man, and a follow-through from a dumb 42-year-old man."
Bass didn't take any shortcuts. His tattoo is, in fact, the complete box score from the Rangers' Game 5 win: Every player's line for the game (both Rangers and Diamondbacks), every extra-base hit, every inherited runner, every pitching line. Even the umpires and attendance, noted at the bottom.
Full box scores like the one on Bass' back are becoming somewhat of a relic, appearing mostly (if not only) in physical newspapers.
So Bass had to track down a copy from a friend at The Dallas Morning News, and then got some help putting it onto a PDF printout, which he took to the tattoo shop Tuesday night. That's when tattoo artist Roger Glasgow went to work, starting from the bottom of the box score, where the attendance is listed, and working his way up through every stat, note, and both lineups, to the very top.
"Rangers 5, Arizona 0."
The process took more than four hours.
"My wife is OK with it," Bass said. "Which that's probably the biggest hurdle. My kids think it's weird. They don't quite understand it, because kids don't read newspapers anymore and they don't look at box scores."
But Bass sure did when he was a kid. And that's what initially gave him the idea to go with a box score over, say, a World Series trophy.
"So I thought it was very appropriate, because my dad and I bonded over baseball," he said. "I would devour box scores on the living room floor on a Sunday morning, opening up the Morning News."
Bass' favorite stat line from his newly-inked back can be found under the pitchers, where Nathan Eovaldi's six-inning escape act is immortalized with a clean "0" on runs allowed.
"It felt like every inning he was playing with fire," Bass said, "and he would just wiggle out of his own mess."
Then there's the minutiae section of the box score where the game's lone home run, from Marcus Semien in the 9th, is noted.
"Which is kind of where everybody felt like, OK, this is actually gonna happen," Bass said. "And for him, who was having a very tough series, to come through with a home run in that situation was huge."
David Mino, Bass' co-host on The Sweet Spot, remembered when Bass declared he'd get the tattoo in 2010. After the Rangers finally won, Bass and Mino broadcasted through the night. Then there was the parade a couple days later, and then the end of the Cowboys season and The Ticket's Super Bowl coverage a few weeks ago.
All along, Mino knew Bass had that long-lost tattoo guarantee looming.
"It was something we would kind of half-joke about, but I knew he was going to do it," Mino said. "If they won it, I knew Sean's a man of his word. I knew he was gonna go through with it."
Bass managed to get it done just in time for The Sweet Spot's trip to Rangers spring training next week. For all the tattoo's detail, it takes up about half of Bass' back.
And that leaves room for at least one more.
"If they go back-to-back, I'll get one one my back," Bass said, "and they'll be back-to-back, on my back."