At the end of April I reclaimed my “have been to all 30 major-league parks” status with a trip to Globe Life Field to see the Texas Rangers take on the visiting Athletics.
I’d like to tell you that the rest of this piece is a celebration of baseball, but alas it isn’t — beyond the common-sense note that watching baseball is always at least an amiable diversion, and so any place that allows you to do that is worth visiting. Someone on a message board described Globe Life Field as the world’s largest Embassy Suites atrium, and that’s it exactly — the Rangers spent a lot of time and money to engineer a hulking non-place, so steeped in anonymity that the baseball within it feels incidental. And they did so just a quarter-century after moving into Globe Life Park, which I visited in 2019 [1] and didn’t think needed a replacement. (It lives on as Choctaw Stadium and now hosts soccer.)
The best seats at Globe Life Field don’t feel particularly merit the name, as everything feels like it’s happening in another county. The sound design is a particular miss: It’s boomy but diffuse, muffled and lost in so gigantic a place. I have no desire to see another baseball game at Globe Life Field, but I also wouldn’t bother to see a rock concert here.
Some of the things that annoyed me at Globe Life Field, to be fair, are more about being a godless blue-stater in Arlington, Texas. The Rangers’ various doings are celebrated by the Six Shooters, a troupe of cheerleaders who prance around in jeggings and some-number-of-gallon hats — it’s very modern Texas, big and brassy and a little cringey. Less amusing is that the park is the new home of the “One Riot, One Ranger” statue, removed from public view years ago after community discussions about the history of the lawmen who gave the baseball Rangers their name and the role they played in anti-Mexican violence and stoking or failing to calm racial tensions. That was the broader context for the specific flashpoint, which was that the statue was modelled on Jay Banks, who became infamous for his conduct while leading the lawmen sent to stop desegregation at a Dallas-era high school in the mid-1950s, as captured in this searingly iconic news photo [2] from the time. The team has halfheartedly claimed Banks might not have been the model for the statue, which is mildly hilarious given that Banks, the sculptor and the Texas Rangers museum are all on record that he was. (The Athletic has an excellent overview of the situation here [3].)
The history of the Texas Rangers is too big for this baseball blog, but this feels like an own goal, a move no one asked for that’s had the effect of alienating a chunk of a community one would presumably want to make welcome. Though this is the Rangers, the only MLB team not to host a Pride Night and one of just two to see maternity leave as too radical.
(They do, however, offer a sensory room.)
The Rangers’ answer to questions like this is to say that they do everything they can to make anyone feel welcome, and to their credit that was true during our visit. Everyone we dealt with — from the cop explaining the labyrinth of parking lots to the 50-50 raffle guy — was helpful and nice in a way that felt genuine, and I’ll give extra credit to the folks at the fan relations booth. I stopped there to explain that I’d now been to all 30 parks and to ask if the Rangers had a commemorative button, as teams including the Marlins do. They didn’t, but a man at fan relations painstakingly and charmingly customized my visit certificate to note the achievement, a gesture I appreciated more than getting handed a button.
So anyway, Emily and I watched the Rangers and A’s play, including old friends Jeff McNeil [4], once-upon-a-time Cyclone Carlos Cortes [5] and Brandon Nimmo [6]. Nimmo was interviewed in canned pregame footage while tootling around in a golf cart; he was of course charming, and a guy helping people find their seats lit up in discussing the energy he’s brought to the team. It was fun to see Nimmo again, and to spend a couple of hours watching baseball — even if it was in the world’s largest Embassy Suites atrium.
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What’s that, you say? This is a blog about the Mets?
OK, sure — but do any of us want to talk about the Mets?
I decided to turn off Memorial Day’s late matinee after the Reds extended their early lead to 5-0 against Nolan McLean [7], and by the time I got myself together to relocate it was 7-0, which wasn’t exactly an invitation to reconsider.
Turns out McLean’s rookie struggles were merely deferred instead of skipped, as he’s hit a rough patch that will demand adjustments to escape — understandable but still no fun to witness. The team continues to not hit at all, looking gripped by a collective nervous breakdown, and they can be relied on to fail in any of a number of other ways in a given game. Errors, mental mistakes, inept ABS challenges, simple bad luck? One or all of those things will befall the Mets if needed to push them closer to another loss.
It’s a long trudge [8] into pointlessness, one that’s going to lead to firings and a fire sale unless some kind of miraculous turnaround presents itself, and the only hope to grasp at is that miraculous turnarounds by their nature don’t signal they’re on the way. We all know this and to belabor it further would be to add insult to injury. We just all — from agonized principals to helpless bystanders — would like it to end.
No comments, because I’m not in the mood.