Ballpark Review: Globe Life Field

Home of the World Series Champion Texas Rangers

Part of me wants to understand why the Rangers built Globe Life Field. I’ve been to baseball games in the humid summer heat of Kansas City and St. Louis and Chicago and, yes, Texas, and I know it’s miserable. I can only imagine having most of an entire season to play in those conditions. After a while, you’d start to think a roof would be nice. So I do get that part of it.

But indoor baseball sucks. It just does. I’m sorry to everyone in a city where the ballpark has a roof, either permanent, sliding, or otherwise, but the quality of your ballgames is simply lesser than it is elsewhere. Baseball should be played outside. Even if it’s cold or rainy, it’s better than the alternative.

I had been to its predecessor, The Ballpark at Arlington, in 2001, and I found it to be a wonderful park. Yeah, it was hot, and the team wasn’t very good, but it was a nice place to watch a game. And it wasn’t even that old, built in 1994. In fact, it’s still there, right across the parking lot from the new place, only rebranded as Choctaw Stadium and now serving as home to professional rugby, soccer and the XFL. Here it is, behind my lovely wife being goofy:

Regardless of the wisdom of replacing a park that’s only 25-years old, I will say that Globe Life Field is well-executed for what it is. They’ve done a good job with the area, giving people lots of things to do between food, shopping, nightlife, and the nearby Six Flags and the home of the Cowboys, AT&T Stadium. It’s also central to the overall Metroplex area so it’s as easy to get to as anything in that metro area can be. There’s also a perfect statue of Nolan Ryan in the courtyard outside the park, though I do wish it a likeness of him beating up Robin Ventura.

Inside the ballpark, everything is new and modern and as larger-than-life as you’d expect a Texas ballpark to be. There are six seating layers, and not a bad view in the house. The concourses are incredibly wide, and there are counters where you can stand and watch the game and put down your beer and hot dog down.

There are multiple enormous scoreboards with any graphic or statistic you could possible want to see. All of the seats are comfortable. The pricing is decent. There are ample food selections and the ones we had were tasty.

We went to a game there in September, 2022, when the team wasn’t great and not many people attended, so we didn’t get a good sense of what the atmosphere would be like in a packed house rooting for a good team. Obviously all of that changed this season, and congratulations to them for it.

But it’s worth pointing out the the Rangers won just two of the six home playoff games they played this season, and I kinda understand why. The place, nice as it is, sort of feels like a shopping mall. A really big, really modern shopping mall, but a mall nonetheless. I could’t escape a déjà vu feeling that I was back in the Mall of America, only with a baseball field in the middle instead of an amusement park.

Maybe now that the team is good and the crowds are bigger the experience would be better. Maybe if the roof was open, it wouldn’t feel like I was in the Udvar-Hazy Center at the National Air and Space Museum looking for the Space Shuttle.

But the roof was closed when we was there, and the crowd was small, and all of it seemed like an enormous waste of money that was being mocked by the pretty ballpark across the parking lot.