Texas Rangers’ New Stadium Named For Globe Life
September 20, 2017 by Dallas Observer (TX)
The Texas Rangers have announced the sale of the naming rights for their new stadium that’s under construction to Globe Life Insurance, which owns the naming rights to the team’s current stadium. The deal runs through 2048. For the next two seasons, the Rangers will ply their trade at Globe Life Park, but then it’s off to Globe Life Field for the 2020 season. It’s understandable if you’re a little confused.
Globe Life is the Rangers’ second stadium title sponsor in the club’s 45-year history. In 1972, the team began playing at Arlington Stadium, a retrofitted minor league park previously known as Turnpike Stadium. In 1994, the team moved to what was first known as The Ballpark in Arlington.
A decade later, Ameriquest, one of the United States’ largest subprime mortgage lenders, bought the park’s naming rights and installed an oversize electronic bell in the shape of company’s logo above the center field office building. The Rangers cut off their relationship with Ameriquest in the midst of the subprime crisis in 2007, rechristening the stadium again as Rangers Ballpark in Arlington. Globe Life Insurance purchased the team’s naming rights in 2014, giving the stadium the name it will be buried with at the end of the 2019 season.
The new Globe Life Field’s defining feature will be its retractable roof, intended to finally give North Texas baseball fans respite from the oppressive summer heat.
“While I love Globe Life Park and its history and tradition, I do have to say I look forward to rooting on the Rangers in the new, air-conditioned Globe Life Field,” Bill Leavell, president and CEO of Globe Life Insurance, said Thursday.
Despite the brutal weather it often forced fans to endure, the Rangers’ old stadium will be remembered fondly, both for the team’s achievements in the stadium – all of the Rangers’ 25 home postseason games have been played at Globe Life Park – and for the way it brought together features from the jewel box era of classic ballparks best exemplified by stadiums like Fenway Park and Wrigley Field.
“It is one of my favorite ballparks. I always enjoyed visiting Arlington,” John Thorn, Major League Baseball’s official historian, told the Observer last year. “It seemed to me like a pastry tray assortment of other ballparks. Right field looked like one ballpark; center field looked like another park. I thought it was a pastiche. A delight. I really will miss this park.”
