In typical fashion for this trip, we slept a little after the Astros game, woke up early, and hit the road for Arlington. We saw night game in Arlington, watching the Texas Rangers take on the Baltimore Orioles. One of the girls in our group, Katie, is an avid Rangers fan and it was fun to watch her get giddy as we approached the Globe Life Stadium.
It was a beautiful day in Arlington and since we arrived two hours before game time, there was ample opportunity to explore. I wandered around the concourse, ending up in the left field bleachers watching batting practice. It was one of those great moments where time kind of stops. I jotted some notes down, writing a little bit of my segmented essay from my spot in the outfield. I wished for a practice home run to land near me, but I was a little too far away for any action.
Our seats were on the concourse level and we had a decent view of the game.
Globe Life was an enjoyable ball park. Lots of Ranger fans and they not only cheered on their team, but were also respectful of the Orioles' fans in attendance. However, our seats were in a spot where it was quite distracting to watch the game. We had the group that sang the national anthem behind us (high schoolers being high schoolers, aka loud and annoying), a marriage proposal that happened a few rows down, and some fans that just liked to move around the ballpark.
The Rangers and Orioles put on a good game. The final score ended up being 6-5, Orioles. They scored first in the first and the Rangers came back in the bottom of the first and scored two runs of their own off a homerun from Beltre. Scoring didn't happen again for the Orioles until the third; they added three making it 4-2 and then a homerun in the fifth brought the score to 5-2.
Yet the Rangers weren't out of it yet. They came back and Beltre had his second home run of the game, bringing in three runs, tying the game up. In the sixth, the Orioles were able to put one more run on the board and take the lead.
The Rangers did their best to make a comeback, but it wasn't in the cards for that night. However, it was a good game, we saw some good plays, and even saw Beltre hit two home runs.
What was interesting about this game was seeing how dedicated Ranger fans were. One of the Orioles' players, Cruz, had been on the Ranger team before. However, due to some deals and disagreements and general MLB drama, Cruz left the team. Whenever he came up to bat, he received boos from his once dedicated fans. At the same time, we did see fans with Ranger tshirts supporting Cruz's number. The other player who was discussed was Josh Hamilton, who we had just seen the day before in Houston. He was another former Ranger who was then placed/exchanged/moved to another team. The woman sitting in front of us actually had a 34 Hamilton authentic jersey (and those are pricey) but she informed us that she had the Hamilton removed because he had "betrayed" them. It was fascinating to see first hand the dedication fans have and their inability (perhaps) to understand that while baseball is something fun to watch and support, there is an underlying capitalistic/money-making foundation that drives MLB along with the fact that teams and individual players have strategies to try to be on the best team possible and be the best player possible (and probably make the most money too).
This game was almost four hours long, one of our longer ones. We headed right back to the hotel, well aware that we had a nine hour drive awaiting us in the morning to get to Kansas City for our final game.
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