King of Diamonds: The Ballpark in Arlington

Some sunny afternoon this summer, park yourself in one of the 49,178 good seats at The Ballpark in Arlington and look toward the grassy knoll at center field. There, while screaming children run where they shouldn’t in hopes of catching a fly ball, witness the salvation of baseball.

Salvation requires sin, and baseball’s iniquity has certainly approached pure wickedness. The sport is no longer America’s pastime. It’s hard to say when, exactly, football and basketball surpassed the grand old game in the collective couch-potato consciousness, but surpass it they have.

Major league baseball’s chief transgression, it is often said, is the pampering of the ’90s-style ballplayer, who is arrogant, overpaid, and ungrateful to fans. Really, though, baseball sold its soul to television, which inevitably fails in its effort to cram a graceful, fluid, time-denying game into two hours of adrenaline-inducing entertainment.

Baseball was meant to be watched at a ballpark-ballpark, meaning green, tranquil, and conducive to the game’s almost hypnotically slow pace and quiet charms. Luckily for those who live in and visit North Texas, we now have The Ballpark in Arlington, where architecture, customer comforts, and attention to detail make a languid, pleasureful game wonderfully more rich to experience-and make it easier to bear the fact that despite their early-season winning streak (our fingers are crossed), the Texas Rangers are the only American League team that has never won a pennant. The decidedly Texas-sized Ballpark-1.4 million square feet, $191 million to build-is the closest thing the Dallas-Fort Worth area has to sporting high-culture.

“It’s called the ’batting eye,’ ” says L.D. Lewis, chief tour guide for The Ballpark. We’re standing in the owners’ luxury suite and L.D. is pointing to center field, where a square patch of green divides the center-field seats. “The grassy knoll. It’s there so the batter isn’t distracted by fans or signs moving behind the pitcher.” It’s also where not-yet-jaded boys and girls scamper for home-run balls. They tumble over each other, racing for a baseball. Amazing. It’s one of the few things about the game that has remained constant.

The knoll is only one of the park’s charming touches. Behind those center-field seats is Tom Vandergriff Plaza, named for the former Arlington mayor (now a Tarrant County judge) who was largely responsible for the Washington Senators’ relocation to North Texas in 1972 to begin the Texas Ranger franchise. The Plaza is what makes this ballpark a park: a wide, deep area that runs between the visitor’s bullpen in left field and the west end of the short two-level porch in right field. At some point during a game, it’s imperative to walk along the sidewalks behind the fence and wave at the folks watching the game from the four-story office tower behind center field. Buying a cheap bleacher seat ($4) as I did on Opening Day this year, you can stroll down to the plaza, tanning between put-outs, and watch a half-dozen children at one of the picnic benches sifting through their baseball-card collections. The real thing was happening just over their shoulders, but they were busy with the history and memorabilia of the game. Salvation, again.

Not that all the pleasures of a Ballpark ball game are so subtle. The numbers speak to designer David M. Schwarz’s concern for the customer: 220 restrooms (more stalls for women than men), 52 concession stands, and more than 2,000 TV sets so you can always see the game, even if television reduces it to a hitter facing a pitcher’s backside.

But it’s the details that add to the park’s character: the bats from which all seating-section signs hang; the huge faux baseballs that act as light covers atop and around the stadium; the Lone Star and Texas steer reliefs that recur throughout; the pale red granite from Marble Falls, Texas, that forms the base of the archways; the Texas Rangers logo painted on the Bermuda Tifway overseeded with rye grass behind home plate; the left-field scoreboard, manually operated just as in Babe Ruth’s time; the Home Run Porch in right field, which calls to mind the one in Tigers Stadium and which houses a full-sized restaurant; the wicked angles of the walls down the right-field line that make every ball hit there a challenge; the necessary evil of the corporate logo cleverly placed-the “Target” emblem in right field, beckoning power hitters to use it as a bull’s-eye, as only Jose Canseco has managed to do so far; the mysterious Nolan Ryan “signature” on the wall in the tunnel outside the Rangers clubhouse, where the cement has become greasy and discolored from the fingers of curious fans who must touch his hallowed name.

All these seemingly unrelated quirks give The Ballpark a distinctive quality, one that maintains a big Texas feel while paying homage to the game’s famous smaller parks such as Fenway in Boston. Underscoring the park’s reverence for the game’s history is the Legends of the Game Baseball Museum. The only ballpark museum dedicated to all of baseball (not just the home team), the museum is open year-round and offers truly amazing memorabilia-from a tiny Senators uniform made for John F. Kennedy Jr. just before his father’s fateful trip to Dallas; to Ty Cobb’s jersey; to the trophy the 1939 New York Yankees presented to their dying teammate, Lou Gehrig. Add to the world-class memorabilia the wonderful learning center on the museum’s third floor-a completely interactive and challenging baseball schoolroom for children-and the ballpark has a score of attractions to help save baseball from itself.

“I never get tired of showing this place to people,” L.D. Lewis says while standing in the dugout, looking out at the field of our dreams. “it’s too striking for words.”