Home team : professional sports and the American metropolis
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Home team : professional sports and the American metropolis
Princeton University Press, 1997
Available at 20 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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.
by "Nielsen BookData"