An expansion club, a trucking owner and a mayor with a minor-league park.

The Texas Rangers began life in Washington. English Wikipedia records that when the original Washington Senators left for Minnesota to become the Twins in 1961, the American League added two expansion teams that season, the Los Angeles Angels and a new Washington Senators club. The new Senators played their opening season at Griffith Stadium and from 1962 at District of Columbia Stadium, later called RFK Stadium, under a ten-year lease.

The owner who moved the club was a Minneapolis businessman. In a SABR biography posted on 26 July 2015 and later collected in the book 1972 Texas Rangers: The Team that Couldn’t Hit, Bob Whelan and Steve West write that Bob Short built his money in trucking and hotels, had owned the Minneapolis Lakers basketball club and moved it to Los Angeles, and was treasurer of the Democratic National Committee in 1968. That same year, they write, he bought the Senators from James Lemon. Wikipedia says that by the end of the 1970 season Short was threatening to take the club elsewhere if no buyer came forward.

A Texas mayor had been waiting. Whelan and West describe Arlington, between Dallas and Fort Worth, as a small town whose mayor, Tom Vandergriff, had set out to attract a major-league team to lift the local economy. In a SABR ballpark history posted on 13 January 2018, Will Osgood writes that the story began with a 1959 bond vote for a minor-league park in Arlington, beside the Six Flags Over Texas theme park. That park opened in 1965 as Turnpike Stadium, home of the Double-A Dallas-Fort Worth Spurs of the Texas League until 1971. Wikipedia says the American League owners voted on 21 September 1971 to allow the franchise to move to Arlington for the 1972 season.

The new name came from Texas law enforcement. Wikipedia says the club was renamed after the Texas Ranger Division, the state-wide investigative agency founded by Stephen F. Austin in 1823, when Texas was still part of Mexico, and whose legend also produced fictional figures such as the Lone Ranger. Osgood writes that the Washington Senators changed their name to the Texas Rangers in the move to the Metroplex, and that the enlarged and renamed Arlington Stadium held its opening major-league game on 21 April 1972, against the California Angels. The season had started late because of a players’ strike.

Arlington Stadium carried the state itself into the outfield. Osgood writes that the left-field façade held a scoreboard shaped like the state of Texas, replaced in 1983 by a more standard Diamond Vision board. An upper deck was added in 1978, and the ballpark served the Rangers until 1994.

Corbett, Chiles, Bush, Hicks, then a group led from Arlington and the oil fields.

The ownership chain is long. Wikipedia names Brad Corbett as owner in the mid-1970s and the oilman Eddie Chiles after him. In April 1989 Chiles sold the club to an investment group headed by George W. Bush, who served as managing general partner until he was elected governor of Texas. During that period the club and the City of Arlington agreed to replace the ageing Arlington Stadium with a new ballpark, which opened in 1994 as The Ballpark in Arlington.

Tom Hicks bought the team in 1998, Wikipedia says. After financial problems at Hicks Sports Group, the club filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on 24 May 2010, and a court-ordered auction that August was won by a group led by the Pittsburgh sports lawyer Chuck Greenberg and the club president Nolan Ryan. Major League Baseball’s owners approved the sale on 12 August 2010. The new group, Rangers Baseball Express, LLC, was financed mainly by two oilmen, Ray Davis and Bob R. Simpson, who became co-chairmen. Davis and Simpson have led the club since 2010, and Wikipedia lists them as co-chairmen today.

The ballparks have changed names with sponsors. Wikipedia says naming rights to The Ballpark in Arlington were sold in 2014 to Globe Life and Accident Insurance Company, which renamed it Globe Life Park in Arlington; it is now Choctaw Stadium. In 2020 the club moved across the street to Globe Life Field, whose naming rights Globe Life holds through 2048. Wikipedia says Choctaw Stadium stands just south-east of the site of Arlington Stadium.

The mascot keeps the Western theme. Wikipedia says Rangers Captain, a palomino-style horse in the team’s uniform, was introduced in 2002. He wears number 72, for 1972, the year the club arrived in Arlington, and has outfits to match each uniform the team wears.

Design and documentation.

A baseball club’s identity can predate its arrival in its current city. When a franchise moves, the name, the colours and the lettering may travel with it, be quietly adapted, or be replaced outright, and the choice tells you a good deal about how the owners want the club to be read in its new home. A relocated team’s visual history often comes in layers, with earlier marks surviving as throwback uniforms, museum pieces and merchandise long after they leave the field.

The cap logo carries an unusual amount of weight in this system. It has to work at a small size, stitched in thread, seen from the stands and on television, so clubs tend to settle on a single letter, a monogram or a compact symbol, and to change it far less often than the wordmark or the uniform trim. Colour choices frequently borrow from local symbolism, such as a state bird, a regional landscape or a civic flag, which gives a palette a story beyond the field.

The ballpark completes the picture. Signage, scoreboards, concourse graphics and distinctive architectural features all repeat the club’s colours and marks at architectural scale, turning the stadium itself into part of the brand.

Red, white and blue, with the balance shifting every decade.

The colours have stayed the same while their order has moved. Wikipedia says the club arrived in Texas in double-knit buttoned uniforms with “RangerS” across the chest in red serif rounded letters with blue drop shadows and a white star at the foot of the R, red, white and blue stripes on collar and sleeves, and a blue cap with a red brim carrying a white “T” trimmed in red. In 1975 the club moved to two-button pullovers and turned the road uniform powder blue, with “TEXAS” on the front. A sleeve patch added in 1976 showed the map of Texas and a red star on a red, white and blue shield, with “1776” and “1976” on it that year for the Bicentennial.

Blue took over in the 1980s. Wikipedia says the 1983 uniforms played down red, with a dark royal blue road uniform and an all-blue road cap carrying a red “T.” In 1984 a script “Rangers” appeared on the front, and grey returned for the road late in 1985. The move to The Ballpark in Arlington in 1994 reversed the balance again: red became the primary colour, blue an accent, silver was added, and a red cap carried a white “T” with a blue drop shadow. Blue returned as the dominant colour in 2001, with black added as an accent; the black drop shadows and silver accents were removed in 2014.

Each ballpark has brought a new look. With the move to Globe Life Field in 2020, Wikipedia says, the home uniform took a blue script “Rangers” with white and red trim, and a powder blue alternate came back, paired with a powder blue cap and royal blue brim. The red alternate was retired in 2023 under MLB and Nike’s new limit on uniforms. That year’s City Connect uniform, in cream and midnight blue, introduced the “Peagle,” a creature combining the region’s old minor-league clubs, the Fort Worth Panthers and the Dallas Eagles, with a “TX” in the style of the Eagles. A second City Connect, unveiled in 2026, is red, in a shade drawn from cochineal dye, with “TEJAS” in block letters, piping patterned on charro dress and a sleeve patch of the Texas outline inside papel picado, Wikipedia says.

For a design guide, Texas Rangers shows how a club can keep three flag colours and a single cap letter for half a century while swapping which colour leads, and how the outline of a state can work as a scoreboard, a patch and a cap mark. Compare the city’s basketball neighbour in our Dallas Mavericks guide, and the league-wide marks in the MLB guide. For this guide we use Ranger blue, lone star red and home white with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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