The Texas Rangers grew up as a franchise when they hosted the All-Star Game 29 years ago

“The strike had such a devastating impact on baseball the year before, and so ’95 was trying to bring it back to a normal All-Star Game,” Schieffer said. “But I also think we really tried to celebrate the game instead of it just being a Rangers thing.”

Before opening their retro-style stadium with nods to several historic sites, the Rangers called old Arlington Stadium home, a minor league stadium before the Washington Senators moved to Texas in 1972.

“Honestly, the Rangers didn’t have a major league stadium before that,” Schieffer said. “And so people really responded to it in a big way. And I think it changed the perception that the rest of baseball had of the Rangers.”

The club has since moved across the street and is now in its fifth season under the retractable roof of Globe Life Field. The All-Star Game is held there on Tuesday nights, after practice and the Home Run Derby the day before.

Schieffer was one of the first investors in a group that bought the Rangers in 1989, led by George W. Bush, before he became governor of Texas and the 43rd president of the United States.

The following year, Schieffer took charge of the stadium’s development and negotiated a public-private partnership with Arlington, resulting in the stadium hosting the first All-Star Game in the Dallas area.

“For the first time, the world really came to Arlington for a major event,” said Chuck Morgan, the team’s announcer for all but one season since 1983.

No playoff game was ever played in the old Arlington Stadium. The biggest highlights were Nolan Ryan’s 5,000th strikeout on August 22, 1989, two years before he threw his seventh no-hitter at age 44. Hall of Fame third baseman George Brett of the Kansas City Royals hit the last of his 3,154 hits in the final game in that stadium on October 3, 1993.

Since then, a Super Bowl, an NBA All-Star Game, an NCAA men’s Final Four and the first championship game of the college football playoff era (2014 season) have been played near the home stadium of the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys, a retractable-roof stadium that opened in 2009.

The Rangers won their first World Series title last season. They also made back-to-back World Series appearances in 2010 and ’11 in their old stadium, which still stands and looks the same from the outside, even though it can no longer host an MLB game.

After the Rangers’ final game in 2019, the field was reconfigured, primarily for soccer, with artificial turf installed throughout and the removal of the visitors’ dugout and about a dozen rows of seats on what had been the third-base side. The UFL’s Dallas Renegades, a Major League Rugby team and a Major League Soccer reserve team now call the stadium home.

MLB is using the old stadium as part of its All-Star Village this week, and Schieffer hopes fans who enter the old park can relive some old memories and “just the love of baseball.” But he hasn’t been there since the Rangers’ last game, and he has no plans to go inside.

Schieffer said someone who frequented it when it was a baseball stadium told him after the renovation, “Don’t go back. It’ll break your heart.”

“And I don’t want to do that,” Schieffer said. “We purposely built the baseball field so that it couldn’t be used as a soccer field. We didn’t leave enough room for it. When they changed it and made it a soccer field, they had to take part of it away.”

Schieffer prefers to cherish the memories of what he considered a baseball cathedral.

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