Baseball
Stadium Names:
origins and changes

What's in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.
~ William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

In the table below, names of stadiums of "brief" duration (in general, those in use for less than five years or newly-renamed ones) are shaded lavender, and those of "medium" duration (used for five to nine years) are shaded with dull green colors. Further explanation is given after the end of this table.
NOTE: This page has been replaced by the Stadium names chronology page.

Background explanation

Nearly all new stadiums nowadays are named after whatever corporation bids the highest price for the naming rights, whether or not there is a strong connection to the city. It wasn't always that way, however, and in fact, it was not until the 1990s that baseball stadium naming rights became a routine practice. Information on this page is subject to revision, just as the stadium names themselves are!

The adjacent summary table gives us a clearer picture of long-term trends in stadium naming. The categories in it correspond to those in the Stadiums by class page; they are for the most part chronologically ordered. In terms of corporate name sponsorship, the leading business sector has been Financial services (with 7 named stadiums), followed by Computer / telecommunications (3), Energy / electric utilities (3), and Citrus juice (2). Busch Stadium was the first stadium named after a corporation, but Anheuser-Busch was a tightly controlled family enterprise. (Since it owned the team, it is not considered a "corporate sponsor.") Of the 68 Major League baseball stadiums covered in this Web site (including the three now under construction), 38 retained the same name throughout their MLB lifetime.

A couple years ago the Washington Post cited a study conducted by financial adviser Geoffrey Hargadon of the 45 publicly traded companies that have paid to have their names attached to baseball and football stadiums, as well as sporting arenas used for basketball and hockey. For example, Enron, MCI, and Adelphia (all bankrupt), plus 3Com and QualComm. If you were to have invested your portfolio in that group of companies five years ago, you would have lost an average of 11 percent per year, compared to the Standard and Poor Index of 500 companies, which gained an average of 1/2 percent per year during that period. Real smart!