Home Team: Professional Sports and the American Metropolis

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. (Apr.)