Eating ballpark food
while watching Willie Nelson perform in a giant hightech barn: It sounds like the average Texan’s idea of heaven. But on March 12, 2020, paradise got postponed.
The red-headed stranger and Chris Stapleton were set to open the Texas Rangers’ new home, Globe Life Field, with a concert on March 14 of last year. Seventeen days later, the Rangers were to play the Los Angeles Angels in their first regular-season game in their new stadium. Neither event happened due to the pandemic. Instead, the park had likely the strangest first year of any venue ever. On May 29, 2020, it hosted its first event: a high school graduation. What followed was more graduations, a rodeo championship, and a neutral-site World Series.
This irregular opening, however, gave the team an opportunity to test out a facility for which every detail had been considered: from the distance to the foul poles—329 feet in left of honor of No. 29 Adrian Beltre, 326 in right for No. 26, former manager Johnny Oates—to the way it looked from the street. To handle those details, the Rangers had hired Dallas-based architecture firm HKS, Inc., which had designed nearby AT&T Stadium for the Dallas Cowboys and Globe Life Park, the place they were leaving. Like the team itself, HKS stayed close to home when looking for inspiration for the new park.
“This being Texas, we gravitated towards some of the forms and materials relevant to the Texas aesthetic: the idea of the pitched roofs and the silo structures you see breaking the horizon line on a beautiful sunset,” says HKS Director of Sports and Texas native Fred Ortiz.
That pitched roof distinguishes Globe Life Field from Globe Life Park, an open-air stadium whose facade looks more like a fort than a farmhouse. Texas gets hot in the summer. And a refreshing summer shower does no favors to the infield. While local weather made a roof an obvious option, the Rangers didn’t want to lose the feeling of playing outdoors. So Ortiz and HKS conceived of a single-panel retractable roof made of a transparent plastic polymer that would let in plenty of sunlight.
The end result is four times the size of a football field, weighs 24 million pounds, and can retract in 12 minutes at the push of a button.
always wanted to be an architect, but didn’t realize I could do sports design.” —Fred Ortiz, HKS Director of Sports
The production of just the roof sounds like that of an action blockbuster, merging practical and digital effects teams. A physical model of the ballpark went to a team of consultants who put it through wind tunnels to measure how the roof might affect airflow and, consequently, home runs. Meanwhile, the Unreal Engine—the software powering Fortnite, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order,
and probably 50 other video games you enjoy—created a digital model that could demonstrate, with the stroke of a key, how the roof would close.
Ortiz estimates that toward the end of the process, there was somewhere between 150 and 200 people working on the project. Teams were assembled to consider the perspectives of the many different kinds of people who would enjoy the ballpark. For fans watching the Rangers games at home, the stadium had to be conceived as a stage with proper attention to lighting and how everything would look on television. Fans in the ballpark got even more consideration: The seating bowl was redesigned from the old Globe Life to give every spectator a more intimate view. Even P.A. announcer Chuck Morgan had his seat moved down behind home plate. Finally, HKS and the Rangers had to remember the people who actually use the field. The hitters don’t want deep drives dying at the warning track. And the pitchers want the opposite of whatever the hitters say.
The breadth of problems to solve in such a massive undertaking means that a firm like HKS has to employ lots of different kinds of people from designers, to dedicated researchers, to anthropologists. Ortiz knew from a young age he wanted to design buildings, but his path from drawing them as a kid to creating them as an adult wasn’t always a straight line. He attended the University of Texas at Arlington on a football scholarship but decided to hang around for the architecture program when the school got rid of the football program. Soon, he discovered that he could marry those two interests.
“The advice that I could give kids is obviously keep your options open,” Ortiz says. “Gravitate towards that which fulfills a passion that maybe you don’t even know about. I always wanted to be an architect, but I didn’t realize I could do sports design.”
Meanwhile, fans have finally gotten to enjoy their new ballpark. Despite their team’s struggles on the field, the Rangers’ faithful ranked toward the top of total attendance all season. Chris Stapleton’s All-American Roadshow featuring special guest Willie Nelson even got rescheduled for August of this year, with a series against the in-state rival Houston Astros immediately following. Maybe it’s not heaven. But should the skies ever open up, they’re one button away from closing the roof.