Sports Sprawl: Arlington Stadium and the Rise of Suburban Baseball Venues

Abstract

Arlington Stadium in Arlington, Texas, originally opened as a minor-league stadium in 1965, but by 1972, it became home to the Texas Rangers of baseball’s American League. Although it was an architecturally undistinguished facility, Arlington Stadium shows how civic leaders in Arlington, alongside boosters in nearby Dallas and Fort Worth, utilized organized baseball’s legal doctrine of territorial rights to unify the metro area’s baseball market within a centrally located suburb. Quickly growing Arlington thus became home to a stadium that might one day host a big-league team, although in the meantime, it could host a minor-league team. This article tells the story of Arlington Stadium’s planning and construction, as well as the Rangers’ relocation from Washington, D.C., as a way to understand how a metro area used organized baseball’s idiosyncratic rules, based on a longstanding federal antitrust exemption, to build a suburban home for a major-league team.