Arlington Stadium: The Rangers Find a Home

In the parking lot of what is now Globe Life Field in Arlington, under the asphalt where Rangers fans leave their cars, there was once a baseball stadium that helped transform a minor-league city into a major-league town.

Turnpike Stadium opened on April twenty-third, nineteen sixty-five, a modest ten-thousand-seat venue built forty feet below the surrounding parking lot level, so fans walked downhill to their seats. It was home to the Double-A Texas Spurs, a minor-league affiliate, and for six years it was a quiet, regional ballpark on the outskirts of Dallas and Fort Worth.

Everything changed in the winter of nineteen seventy-one. The Washington Senators were in trouble. Owner Bob Short had decided to move the franchise, and Texas had courted him aggressively. The team relocated to Arlington, renamed the Texas Rangers, and descended into Turnpike Stadium, now hastily rechristened Arlington Stadium. Their first game there was played on April twenty-first, nineteen seventy-two.

Expansion came in waves. Permanent seating crept up the outfield lines. The bowl was enclosed. By the time the Rangers were established as an American League franchise, Arlington Stadium held more than thirty-five thousand fans, though it remained a notoriously hot and exposed venue, offering little shade in the brutal North Texas summer heat.

The Rangers played their last game at Arlington Stadium on October third, nineteen ninety-three, then moved next door into the Ballpark in Arlington, later known as Choctaw Stadium, which opened the following spring. Arlington Stadium was demolished with a wrecking ball in nineteen ninety-four, the site immediately converted to overflow parking for the new ballpark beside it.

For twenty-two years, from nineteen seventy-two to nineteen ninety-three, it was the only home the Texas Rangers ever had in North Texas. The franchise that arrived from Washington built its fan base and its identity on this sunbaked patch of Arlington ground.