The Ballpark in Arlington: Review

Globe Life Park in Arlington rises out of flat, unimpressive parking lot, sharing an exit of the I-30 with Six Flags Over Texas and the spaceship-like AT&T Stadium. There's something quintessentially Texan about it - space was no object, so building a giant baseball stadium with bas-relief cattle horns on the walls in the middle of nowhere made total sense. Baseball is meant to be an urban game - outfield walls curve and dip to accommodate for city blocks, patrons walk to the box office gates straight from a day at the office. Arlington's stadium ex nihilo accentuates the artificiality of an "entertainment complex." It's not an outgrowth of a community or a treasured part of downtown - it's a temple that cloaks revenue maximization in the garb of gussied-up nods to tradition.
And yet even in the midst of a pre-fab Texas-sized playground, the game is still the same. The stadium might be in the middle of former cow pastures off the turnpike, but the DFW Metroplexians still root, root, root for the home team - it's just not a purist's environment by any stretch of the imagination. If God can bring the joy and enthusiasm of a collective experience to a completely contrived forum in the triple-digit of the Texas prairie, what more can he do in the life of someone who's out of his element, who knows she's in the wrong place at the wrong time, but trying to work back towards the straight and narrow? It's encouraging to think that even if your choices - or just life itself - has left you in a situation you regret or wish was different, you can still receive the much-needed grace that helps re-orient your life towards where you're supposed to be. Sure - it's a contrived analogy. But no more contrived than building a 48,000-seat baseball stadium off a freeway 20 miles from the center of the nearest downtown.

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