Home Team
Professional Sports and the American Metropolis
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- $62.99
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- $62.99
Publisher Description
Most books that study professional sports concentrate on teams and leagues. In contrast, Home Team studies the connections between professional team sports in North America and the places where teams play. It examines the relationships between the four major professional team sports--baseball, basketball, football, and hockey--and the cities that attach their names, their hearts, and their increasing amount of tax dollars to big league teams. From the names on their uniforms to the loyalties of their fans, teams are tied to the places in which they play. Nonetheless, teams, like other urban businesses, are affected by 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.
Michael Danielson 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 be 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.
Home Team collects a vast amount of data, much of it difficult to find elsewhere, including information on the relocation of franchises, expansion teams, new leagues, stadium development, and the political influence of the rich cast of characters involved in the ongoing contests over where teams will play and who will pay. Everyone who is interested in the present condition and future prospects of professional sports will be captivated by this informative and provocative new book.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When the Carolina Panthers and Jacksonville Jaguars each came within a game of Super Bowl XXXI earlier this year, observers of the National Football League speculated that the two-year-old clubs benefited from an overly generous draft system. Not coincidentally, both teams also faced an all-out support blitz from local fans and political leaders. The relationship between professional baseball, basketball, football and hockey and the cities in which those sports are played is the focus of this academic and only occasionally intriguing book. Danielson's source material often is dated, but the professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University redeems himself by offering details of Major League baseball's projected 1998 expansion and stories behind other sports' recent expansion teams. Danielson makes some mistakes that color the book, like persistently calling the Carolina's Panthers the Cougars, the name of that state's American Basketball Association team--defunct for 25 years. Don't look here for juicy insider info that will make die-hard fans sit still for several hundred pages of textbook-like writing, detailed source notes and an appendix of every home-team city in the United States and Canada since 1871. Danielson (Profits and Politics in Paradise: The Development of Hilton Head Island) fails to offer more than a handful of compelling arguments and takes a hands-off approach to reporting such business of sport as shared revenues, salary caps, competition for teams, relocation strategies and television rights. The athletes themselves don't even matter here. But despite its faults, Home Team has the power to agitate thinking sports fans with its overwhelming message that dollars and cents mean more to professional sports today than do home runs, touchdowns, goals and free throws.
