New Rangers park to have roof for fans, players. Why not give them grass they want, too?

Globe Life Field, or at least the sale of seats and suites that are being built within the Texas Rangers’ future ballpark, is open for business.

The Rangers have opened a sales office in the vacated home of the club’s Hall of Fame inside Globe Life Park. The office has been open a few weeks but was officially unveiled Tuesday.

It’s a pretty fancy office, too, the highlight of which is a scale model of Globe Life Field, Texas Live! and the Loews hotel. The ballpark portion of the model includes a retractable roof that moves as it will when the real deal opens for the start of the 2020 season.

The playing surface is part of the model, too, and it isn’t natural grass.

Now, it’s not artificial turf, either, and maybe that’s by design as the Rangers continue to insist that no decision has been made on whether to have natural grass or a synthetic surface.

But in a $1.2 billion ballpark that is being built expressly to get fans to come to games in the summertime and to help players survive the smoking hot summer months during the most grueling schedule in sports, why wouldn’t the Rangers give the fans and players what they want?

They want natural grass.

The Rangers? Well, the prevailing thought is that ownership wants artificial surface so that Globe Life Field can be a money-making circus tent when it’s not a baseball stadium.

Concerts? Already being planned.

Football games? Neutral fields are in high demand this time of year.

Tractor pulls and monster trucks? Sound like cash cows.

Rugby? It happened over the All-Star break this year at AT&T Park in San Francisco with devastating results for the natural grass.

All those events are much easier to hold on artificial surface.

The speculation on what will happen leaves Rob Matwick, the Rangers’ executive vice president of business operations, to speak to the fans and players for ownership.

“We want to give them the best surface,” Matwick said Tuesday. “Whether that’s grass or turf, that’s debatable.”

The club’s stance, Matwick reiterated again, is that no decision has been made but that the plans for Globe Life Field were drawn so that natural grass could be grown.

The roof could be open probably half the daylight hours to help grass grow, and natural light will make its way into Globe Life Field even when the roof is closed. Matwick came to the Rangers after many years with the Houston Astros, and he was there when Minute Maid Park was built.

Minute Maid has always had grass under its retractable roof.

So did Chase Field in Phoenix until, well, this season. The Arizona Diamondbacks have announced plans to install artificial surface for 2019. The synthetic grass is designed for baseball and its players, and having it will allow the roof to be closed all summer to keep the ballpark cool for fans.

Phoenix is very hot in the summer and grass there can be difficult to grow. Yet, somehow, the grounds crew there managed to do it for 22 seasons.

But no tractor pulls.

Anyone who has watched the Rangers religiously knows that growing grass at Globe Life Park has been a headache, right field especially. And that’s where Matwick’s comment about the “best surface” comes into play.

What’s better, a state-of-the-art artificial surface or a patchy natural grass surface? And just imagine the patches after a concert or a tractor pull.

Still, the desires of the fans and the players should be front and center. Those are the two groups for whom the new ballpark is being built.

They want natural grass.

If the Rolling Stones taught us anything, though, you can’t always get what you want. And, also, no satisfaction.

Except concerts and tractor pulls.

This story was originally published November 27, 2018 at 7:14 PM.