To get to the owner’s seats at the Texas Rangers’ stadium, a retro redbrick bandbox that looks utterly out of place on the suburban plains of Dallas, you have to pass through a small room beneath the stands that George W. Bush, who participated in the design and construction of the stadium in the early 1990s, envisioned as a bunker for his father, then president of the United States. But the younger Bush divested himself of his interest in the Rangers before the Ballpark at Arlington was completed, and the concrete bunker now serves as a V.I.P. lounge.

When I met one of the team’s new owners, Nolan Ryan, there midway through a home game against the Minnesota Twins one night in August, he was munching on melon and refilling a cup of iced tea. Ryan led me to his box behind the Rangers’ on-deck circle and introduced me to his wife, Ruth, who has known Ryan since he was a Little League pitcher in Alvin, Tex.

During his major-league career, Ryan kept himself lean and taut. At 63, he has relaxed into the more generously proportioned body of an ex-athlete, with an ample gut, a broad chest and massive, rounded shoulders. Earlier in the day, when I spoke with Ryan in his office, he was wearing a dress shirt and tie; he tugged roughly and repeatedly at his collar, vainly trying to give his thick neck a little extra room to breathe.

He seemed much more comfortable now, settling into his seat in a red Rangers polo shirt. As a pitcher, Ryan was not known for his economy — he holds the major-league record for walks in addition to strikeouts — but as a baseball analyst, he doesn’t waste words. He spoke in a low voice with a Texas twang, dispassionately labeling pitches and their locations as a taxonomist would (“cutter, middle-in”).

Ryan purchased the Rangers this past summer, putting an end to one of the more feckless ownership stints in the history of the game. As a business story, the tale of the franchise under Tom Hicks, who bought the Rangers fr...