It's Gotten Too Hot for Outdoor Baseball in Texas
The Texas Rangers are replacing a perfectly good ballpark with a $1.2 billion air-conditioned stadium.
“Under Texas skies” sounds a lot better than “inside Texas air-conditioning”
Photographer: Ronald Martinez/Getty ImagesThe Texas Rangers baseball team played its last game in Globe Life Park on Sunday. I’ve never been, but as a fan of the Rangers’ divisional foe the Oakland A’s, I have watched many games there on television and it seemed like quite a nice place. Completed in 1994, what was originally called the Ballpark at Arlington was located amid gigantic parking lots in a gigantic suburb (Arlington now has more people than Cincinnati, Cleveland, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, St. Louis or Tampa) midway between Dallas and Fort Worth, but from the inside it looked like an old-timey urban stadium.
Another distinctive thing about it was that players there seemed to sweat a lot, even at night games. While it was harder to tell this from TV, the fans apparently did, too. In a recent Texas Monthly essay, Jason Heid recounted several glorious baseball happenings he had experienced at Globe Life Park, then added: