The Dallas Mavericks were hosting the Miami Heat in an NBA Finals game tonight about a half-hour away from the Ballpark at Arlington, leaving a lot of empty seats and plenty of room for me to roam about as I made my first trip to see the home of the Texas Rangers.

And plenty of roaming there is to do. There’s the suite level. On my budget nobody was going to let me in the rooms but a friendly usher did let me wander around a bit. The rooms are named after Hall of Famers and are decorated with art featuring their namesakes.

There’re plenty of restaurants and concessions stands, some fairly generic with the typical ballpark fare and others Irish pubs or wine bars.

There is a great view of the palace Jerry Jones built for his Dallas Cowboys (my phone would not take a picture that did the view justice, but wow, does it stand out).

And then there’s my favorite feature, the wiffle ballpark in centerfield where kids took cuts throughout the game. It’s a favorite spot at the Ballpark, in part, because I’m one of the worst players in one of the country’s most hard-core wiffleball leagues back home in Minneapolis.

The Ballpark is not a perfect venue, though it is a very nice one. It opened back in 1994 just before a lot of the new-era parks started coming online and so its designers did not have the opportunity to incorporate some of the amenities the new era parks feature.

Some of the seats don’t face toward the infield. It felt somewhat Wrigley Field-like in some parts of the park’s lower regions in that the seats that are further back in a section have views that are somewhat encumbered by the deck of seats atop them.

And my biggest beef is with the concourses – most of the concessions are on interior walls rather than exterior walls, meaning you can’t watch the game very well from spots away from your seats.

But it is a very nice park with great views from almost every vantage point. I bought a ticket about halfway between first base and the left fielder, which provided a nice view of the brand new scoreboard the team installed during the offseason. I had a nice view of everything during the two innings I watched from there.

After that I started to wander. From the nosebleed sections in the outfield overlooking the bullpens and the wiffleball games to the close-up seats (even the ones where the overhang is a little lower than ideal) you have great views of the action.

There’s just enough between-innings action to keep the kids entertained but not so much that it drove me crazy.

And then there was my favorite aspect of the Ballpark. It is very hospitable. Everywhere you turn around there are folks holding up signs asking if they can help you in any way.

They helped me with everything from finding the stairway that would lead me to my seats to where I should exit the ballpark to find a taxi and they were friendly as could be in doing so. And at one point I sat in a section just to the first base side of home plate a few rows up. I was greeted by one of the women who volunteers to hand out promotional items during most games.

She was most pleasant and very talkative and knowledgeable about the team and the ballpark. I chatted with her for a couple innings before moving on to another part of my self-guided tour.
Overall it is an aesthetically pleasing park that falls short of some of Major League Baseball’s newest and nicest venues. Some of the quirky things that come with the Rangers’ park there isn’t much the team can do to fix at this point. But they can take steps to make visitors’ experiences as pleasant as possible.

With a new ownership group and a new television contract, this organization is not just poised to be competitive on the field for several years to come. The Rangers have their act together off the field as well.