Abstract
During late 1993, Jerry Colangelo—who owned the National Basketball Association (NBA) Phoenix Suns—assembled an investment group titled Arizona Baseball Inc. in order to apply for a Major League Baseball (MLB) expansion team. Confident of being awarded a new franchise, Colangelo’s group held a name-the-team contest and took out a full-page advertisement in the sports section of a February edition of the Arizona Republic. The winning entry, Diamondbacks, was the name of a rattlesnake native to the region and known to inject a large amount of venom when it struck.
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Notes
- 1.
See Frank P. Jozsa Jr., Major League Baseball Expansions and Relocations: A History, 1876–2008 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), and James Quirk and Rodney D. Fort, Pay Dirt: The Business of Professional Team Sports (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).
- 2.
Each MLB team has a franchise timeline on its website. For this chapter, there is data and other information at http://www.arizona.diamondbacks.mlb.com
- 3.
Sources include the Official Major League Baseball Fact Book 2005 Edition (St. Louis, MO: Sporting News, 2005) and “Teams,” http://www.baseball-reference.com cited 28 January 2015, plus “National League Team Histories.” http://www.sportsecyclopedia.com cited 1 May 2015.
- 4.
“E.G. (Ken) Kendrick,” http://www.arizona.diamondbacks.com cited 9 August 2015.
- 5.
The financial studies and results in this chapter are, respectively, “The Business of Baseball,” http://www.forbes.com cited 28 January 2015, and also “Major League Baseball Valuations,” http://www.bloomberg.com cited 2 February 2015.
- 6.
Paul Swaney, “2014 MLB Ballpark Experience Rankings,” http://www.stadiumjourney.com cited 23 February 2015.
- 7.
Barry Janoff, “Report: When It Comes to 2014 MLB Fans, the Most Loyal Group is the Cards,” http://www.nysportsjournalism.com cited 23 February 2015 and “MLB Team Loyalty Winners and Losers,” http://www.brandkeys.com cited 14 February 2015.
- 8.
Business articles about the Diamondbacks franchise include Tracy Ringolsby, “Series a Boost for D-Backs’ Bottom Line,” Rocky Mountain News (27 October 2001): 9D, and Bill King and John Ourand, “The RSN Conundrum,” SportsBusiness Journal (17 March 2014): 1.
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Jozsa, F.P. (2016). Arizona Diamondbacks. In: National League Franchises: Team Performances Inspire Business Success . SpringerBriefs in Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25993-2_11
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