Home Team

This text studies the connections between professional team sports in North America and the places where teams play. It examines the relationship between the four major team sports and the cities that attach their names, hearts and an increasing amount of tax dollars to big league teams.

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This text studies the connections between professional team sports in North America and the places where teams play. It examines the relationship between the four major team sports - baseball, basketball, football and hockey - and the cities that attach their names, hearts and an increasing amount of tax dollars to big league teams. From the names on the uniforms to the loyalties of their fans, team are tied to the places in which they play. Nonetheless, teams, like other urban businesses, are affected by the changes in their environments, like the flight of their customers to suburbs and changes in local political climates. In "Home Team", professional sports are scrutinized in the larger context of the metropolitan areas that surround and support them. The author is particularly interested in the political aspects of the connections between professional sports teams and cities. He points out that local and state governments are now major players in the competition for franchises, providing increasingly lavish publicly funded facilities for what are, in fact, private business ventures.
As a result, professional sports enterprises, which have insisted that private leagues rather than public laws are the proper means of regulating games, have become powerful political players, seeking additional benefits from government, often playing off one city against another. The wide variety of governmental responses reflects the enormous diversity of urban and state politics in the United States and in the Canadian cities and provinces that host professional teams.