DOCUMENTARY
The Texas Rangers’ new stadium is not a home run.
Stadiums make statements. Namely, “I’m rich.”
The Texas Rangers’ brand-new $1 billion ballpark, Globe Life Field, opened in May for a high school graduation and will tentatively host its first Major League Baseball game on July 24. But back in 2016, a group of Arlington volunteers — unhappy that their taxes were slated to foot half the bill — waged a passionate campaign to defeat the stadium at the ballot box.
They lost, but the new documentary “Throw a Billion Dollars From the Helicopter” memorably captures their quixotic struggle.
“It’s a great story, if you like giving away lots of money,” one of those volunteers tells the camera.
The Rangers opened their previous ballpark, most recently known as Globe Life Park, in 1994. Their owners at the time, including future President George W. Bush, expected it to last 100 years. But times change. The team was sold in 2010, the year after the Dallas Cowboys moved to Arlington, and soon enough, the Rangers needed a new home, too.
One of a handful of economics professors in the film, directed by filmmaker Michael Bertin, who splits his time between Austin and Chicago, calls these new stadiums “monuments to owners.”
“It’s sort of like patronage in the Middle Ages,” he says, “where wealthy people build fancy things to dedicate to themselves, to show how important they are.”
But here, the driving force behind the stadium push is not the Rangers’ primary owners, reclusive energy billionaires Bob Simpson and Ray Davis, but politicianslick Arlington Mayor Jeff Williams. Elected in 2015, the toothsome civic leader argues that, among other reasons, a new air-conditioned park will help attract more millennials to ballsays games. As he’s talking, Bertin helpfully graphs out a survey saying only 6 percent of that age group prefer baseball as their favorite sport.
“This is not just about (Williams), but he’s part of this: I do not think we’re electing the best people to be our representatives,” the first-time director, who has also written for the sports sites Deadspin and Grantland. “And that’s at all levels of government.”
On the other side of the issue is Citizens for a Better Arlington, well-organized activists who, not long before the stadium fracas, had successfully lobbied to repeal Arlington’s red-light camera law. The CBA pulled out all the grassroots stops — canvassing, homemade signs, clever T-shirts, socialmedia pressure — but ultimately lost the referendum by a fairly wide margin. (Williams, who declined to be interviewed for the film, was reelected mayor in 2017 and again last May.)
It didn’t help that Williams had openly floated the possibility of losing the Rangers to Dallas or another North Texas community — none of which had even been courting the team. (Openly, at least.) Dallas especially, the film argues, was too broke to even think about making an offer.
“I don’t know how you convince a majority of the people that they can vote against (the stadium) and it will be OK,” Bertin says, “because I think the fear of losing the team is going to overrule any rational thought they have about the economics of things. To me, it’s crazy.”
“Throw a Billion Dollars” also takes a couple of enlightening detours back to the origins of the Rangers’ move from Washington, D.C., in 1972 and to St. Louis, where bar and restaurant owners talk about how their businesses dried up shortly after the Cardinals’ ownership opened the prefab nightlife district Ballpark Village. The film handily deflates the myth that new stadiums are a boon to anyone but the people who build them.
Its sharpest point is that in sports, irrationality rules, and appearances matter more than reality.
Lucky for the Rangers. When photos of Globe Life Field began circulating on Twitter last month, users likened it to a barbecue grill, a livestock barn and a Home Depot. User @RedditCFB said it seemed “designed purely to troll the Astros by looking like a trash can.”
But now that it’s up, Bertin’s advice for Rangers fans is that they might as well embrace their silver-roofed new home.
“Call it ‘The Shack’ and play ‘Love Shack’ during the seventhinning stretch every game,” he says. “Just own how awful it is. I think it’s the only thing you can do at this point.”