ARLINGTON – For many home openers during his 27 Hall of Fame seasons, Nolan Ryan arrived at the park with the sole purpose of pitching his best.

But at 8 a.m. Tuesday, he pulled into the Rangers Ballpark in Arlington for his first home opener as team president and immediately asked for weather and traffic updates.

The weather cooperated and there were fewer traffic snarls than expected, but as Baltimore's 8-1 victory showed, the Rangers have other issues that are beyond their legendary 61-year-old president's control.

"Am I disappointed? Yeah, I'm disappointed," Ryan said. "Anytime you have a crowd like that, you want to win. But you have to look at it as just one game. We'll be back out here tomorrow night."

Many of the 48,808 fans munched on Nolan Ryan's Guaranteed Tender hamburgers and sausages-on-sticks as another native Texan took the mound for the Rangers.

But unlike Ryan, who won the 1990 and 1993 home openers at old Arlington Stadium, Jason Jennings allowed two home runs and was pulled in the fifth inning.

During and after his playing career, Ryan has sold consumers on Dilly Bars, pain relief medication, foundation repair and meat products, but now he is the front-office face of a franchise that has one playoff victory in 36 seasons.

"Nolan's doing exactly what I hoped he would do," said Rangers owner Tom Hicks, who on Feb. 6 named Ryan the 10th president in team history. "He's being Nolan. He's slowly, methodically getting his arms around every issue on the baseball side and on the business side.

"He's putting his stamp on things."

The last time a Hall of Fame baseball player served as a team president was 1925. The player was former pitcher Christy Mathewson and the team was the Boston Braves.

Mathewson died a week after that season and wasn't inducted into the Hall until the inaugural class of 1936. It is doubtful he had to fret about road closures and construction during his short tenure.

Road work being done around the Ballpark in Arlington has led Ryan to sit in on several meetings with Texas Department of Transportation officials. Never mind that one of the affected thoroughfares is Nolan Ryan Expressway.

"No pull," Ryan chuckled when asked the obvious question. "I've attended some of the meetings just so we have a stake in the process and the impact it has on us."

So why would a man with 324 pitching victories, a major league-record 5,714 strikeouts and seven no-hitters want to do this? Simple, Ryan reiterated Tuesday. He's a baseball man.

When he started the 1993 season opener at age 46, sons Reid and Reese were in college and high school, respectively.

Tuesday morning, as Reid and wife Nicole drove to Arlington, Reid told 8-year-old son Jackson and 6-year-old daughter Victoria about coming to watch his father pitch in Arlington Stadium.

Also in attendance were Reese and wife Alison and Nolan's wife Ruth. Reid and Reese run the day-to-day operations of their family's minor league teams in Round Rock and Corpus Christi.

"For Reese and I, this has been fun," Reid said. "Because what Nolan's going through, we've been through the last 10 years with our ballclubs. It's fun to sit back and watch him sweat the small stuff."