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Rendering provided by HKS Inc.
Globe Life Field
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Rendering provided by HKS Inc.
Globe Life Field
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Rendering provided by HKS Inc.
Globe Life Field
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Rendering provided by HKS Inc.
Globe Life Field
The Mayor of Arlington is hot. The giant, gleaming scoreboard above right field says 98 degrees, but it feels more like 110. Plus, for this summer 2019 baseball game, Mayor Jeff Williams has a place in the shade; most fans do not. He can’t imagine how they feel, watching the Texas Rangers battle the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim on this sweltering summer day. As he sips a soda and tries to focus on the action, the mayor thinks one thing, over and over again: “This’ll be better next year.”
Next year has arrived. On March 31, the Texas Rangers are set to kick off their 2020 campaign in the brand-new Globe Life Field, not to be confused with Globe Life Park, their previous home and now neighbor. The ballpark is the result of 30 months of building, years of dreaming, and decades of sweating by fans who supported their hometown team through back-to-back World Series losses and more triple-digit days than you can shake a plastic fork at. The Mayor of Arlington is excited.
“The goal was always to build the best baseball experience we can for the best baseball fans in the country,” he says. “The amenities are terrific, and the food is outstanding. People won’t have to eat before the game anymore.”
Cooler temperatures will be possible, thanks to a 480-foot-wide retractable roof, which the construction team claims is the largest roof of its kind in the world. Call it “everything is bigger in Texas” bravado or a simple necessity. Either way, any time it rains, sleets, hails, or gets a little too hot, the ballpark brass will have the option to cover the field with a gargantuan roof.
“I think the new stadium is going to be big for the organization,” Williams says. “In the past, pitchers were hesitant to come to Arlington. In the old one, the heat could be unbearable.”
Greg McClure remembers “the old one.” He helped build it. McClure is senior vice president at Manhattan Construction and was the project director for the new ballpark build. As a boy, the Arlington native was a youth league ballplayer and diehard Rangers fan.
“I remember the excitement when the Rangers came to town in the ’70s,” he says. “Going to the ballpark was the thing to do.”
The Texas Rangers arrived in Arlington in 1971. They played their ballgames at Arlington Stadium, a mostly forgettable ballpark that hosted mostly forgettable Rangers teams. In 1993, the Rangers moved to what was eventually called Globe Life Park in Arlington, and the real highlight reel began, including two failed trips to the World Series — in 2010 and 2011.
When 22-year-old closer Neftali Feliz struck out the loathed A-Rod to beat the Yankees and take the Rangers to their first World Series, the audience of 51,404 Rangers fans at Globe Life Park erupted into eardrum-shattering euphoria.
“I’ve never seen fans happier than they were in 2010,” McClure says. “That’s what we want to capture with the new ballpark. We want fans to be excited about coming to a game every day.”
The stadium was announced on May 19, 2016. The announcement included mention of a retractable roof and an accompanying entertainment complex, later dubbed Texas Live!
“It has been the vision of our community for decades to get development around the ballpark,” Williams said in a press conference announcing the project. Yet the main attraction was the roof.
“The first priority was always getting some shade,” Williams said in a phone interview in early February 2020.
Before construction crews could break ground, the people had to vote. The city of Arlington proposed a deal: We’ll pay for half; the Rangers will pay for the other half and pick up any overages. But when “half” is $500 million, some voters take umbrage.
The proposed deal called for the city to issue a half billion in bonds. A half-cent of sales tax, a 2% hotel occupancy tax, and a 5% car rental tax would pay off those bonds over 30 years.
Some fans, including staunch anti-stadium advocate Jeff Prior, wondered what was wrong with the Rangers’ current home. Prior was a spokesman for Save Our Stadium, an organization that advocated for a “No” vote on the new stadium proposition. The organization’s Twitter account, which is still active, argued that fewer seats, higher ticket prices, and higher taxes were all evidence of a bad deal for the city and its denizens.
“You’re always going to have people who question the cost,” Williams said. “That’s why we talked to the people, and we held a vote.”
On Election Day 2016, roughly 60% of Arlington voters approved the bond measure. Soon after, the Rangers tasked Dallas-based architecture firm HKS Inc. to design the stadium. HKS designed the Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium and designed Globe Life Park for the Rangers in the early 1990s.
“We’ve always valued our relationship with this organization,” says Fred Ortiz, one of the firm’s leads on the Globe Life Field project. “So, we jumped at the chance to work with them again.”
HKS designed a ballpark that would incorporate some of Globe Life Park’s architecture into a more intimate setting. That means fewer seats (40,300, compared to its former home’s 49,115) but more visibility, including 360-degree circulation on the upper and lower concourse. No matter where they are, fans will be able to see the action on the field without resorting to the tiny television sets above concession stands. In the new ballpark, concessions are receded from the seating bowl, thereby avoiding any obstruction of views. Stadium dimensions were designed with team legends in mind. For example, recently retired third baseman Adrian Beltre, who wore No. 29, inspired the left field line, which is 329 feet.
“Honoring those legends was important to us,” Ortiz says. “We wanted it to be a place that highlighted the team’s history.”
In late September 2017, the Manhattan Construction team broke ground on Globe Life Field.
McClure, who helped build Globe Life Park and four other stadiums, took the lead as project director. He admits that stadium builds are a nightmare.
“They’ll pull your hair out, they’ll scare you to death, and they’ll keep you up at night,” he says. The new Rangers ballpark was no different.
The 30-month process involved thousands of construction workers, 57 salaried construction managers, and more steel than McClure cares to estimate (the roof alone needed 19,000 tons).
“This is a puzzle, so we had to make sure the right pieces were here at the right time so we can build this thing bottom to top,” McClure says.
McClure and Rob Matwick, Texas Rangers’ executive vice president of business operations, acknowledge that the 30-month journey has been fraught with more challenges than they foresaw. In early December 2019, the construction team closed the retractable roof for the first time, but less than a week later, the roof caught fire. Damage was minimal, but McClure knows how it looks.
“I never promised we’d be done early,” McClure says with a laugh. Nevertheless, he insists they won’t be done late.
“We’ll go right up to the wire, but when you walk in here, it’ll be a bright, shiny new stadium, and no one will know what it took to get it that way.”
Williams is excited that the stadium will be operable 365 days a year. Baseball purists may be annoyed by the field’s artificial turf, but the Mayor prefers it.
“We can do multiple sports, boat shows, concerts, anything,” he says. “Imagine going to a baseball game one day, then a Big 12 tournament game the next.”
He also expects the stadium to help rake in as much as $17 million in tourism in 2020, which would be $3 million more than 2019’s haul. But ultimately, the Mayor can promise at least one thing about the new stadium.
“I can assure you this: It’ll be cooler,” he says.
Globe Life Field will open with a concert by Chris Stapleton on March 14. The Texas Rangers will play its first game in the ballpark on March 31.
