Relocated Sports Teams

Podcast Transcript

Many people have one or more favorite sports teams. Most people support these teams because they happen to be the team close to where they live.

What many people don’t realize is that many teams, especially major sports teams in North America, didn’t originate in the city where they are today.

In some cases, teams have moved multiple times, changed names, and even returned to the city where they originally came from.

Learn more about relocated sports teams and teams and the cities they abandoned on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

Before I get too far into this episode, I should clarify a few terms that I’ll be using. When I say a “team” has gone defunct, I’m referring to a team that played games under a certain name in a certain city.

The legal entity, which was the team, more often than not, doesn’t disappear when a team disappears.

So, for the purpose of this episode, I’m making a distinction between a team and a franchise. For the purpose of this episode to make things easy, the Brooklyn Dodgers will be a different team than the Los Angeles Dodgers, even though there is an obvious continuity between the two.

That being said, the phenomenon I’ll be talking about is mostly a North American phenomenon.

It is almost unheard of for a European football club to move cities. It has happened, but it is very, very rare, and it usually only involves moving a short distance so that local fans can still support the team. It usually is a matter of finding a suitable stadium more than anything else.

I’ve looked and cannot find a single example of an English football club that ever moved to a different city. If such a team exists, I’d love to hear it, but my guess is that it would be a very low-level team.

The reason why this is unheard of for most European football clubs is because of the club model they exist under and the system of promotion and relegation that European leagues use.

Other countries have seen limited movement of teams. Australia has a hybrid franchise-club model. A few Australian football teams have moved. The South Melbourne Swans moved to Sydney in 1983, and in 1996, the Brisbane Bears took over the operations of Fitzroy, which was one of the original AFL teams from Melbourne.

Likewise, in Japan, the Nippon-Ham Fighters baseball team moved from Tokyo to the island of Hokkaido in 2004.

So, while I acknowledge that team relocation does occur in other countries, the rest of this episode is going to focus on North American teams because it occurs more often in North America than anywhere else by a wide margin. In fact, it happens here in one sport or another every few years.

The reason why it happens so frequently in the United States and Canada is because of the franchise system that governs North American sports.

Teams in North America are businesses first and foremost. If a community isn’t supporting a team, or more realistically, if a local government doesn’t support them getting a new stadium, moving the team is always something they can threaten.

Because spots in a sports league are limited, there are more communities that could support a team than there are teams. Because having a professional sports team is considered to give prestige to a city, there are always cities that are looking to attract teams.

So, with that, let’s start with baseball and one of the first teams to relocate, the Baltimore Orioles in 1903.

The first iteration of the Orioles was not the precursor to the team with the same name today. They were one of the inaugural teams in the new American League in 1901, but in the middle of the 1902 season, their manager, John McGraw, jumped ship to the New York Giants of the National League and took many of their top players with him.

The team managed to finish the season under control of the league and with players on loan from other teams.

In early 1903, the National and American Leagues came to an agreement and allowed an American League team in New York City to play alongside the Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers.

The Orioles moved and changed their name to…..the New York Yankees.

Baseball franchises were relatively stable for the next 50 years. There were no new expansion teams, and nobody moved.

The problem is that all of the teams were located in the east. The westernmost city with a baseball team was Saint Louis, which had the Cardinals and Browns.

The population was moving west, but that wasn’t reflected in its sports teams.

The first team to upset the stability was the Boston Braves. In 1953, they moved to Milwaukee to become the Milwaukee Braves. Must of the reason for the move is because the Braves were the second team in Boston to the Red Sox.

The Milwaukee Braves were successful as a club. They never had a losing season, and they won the World Series in 1957. They had several top-tier Hall of Fame players, including Eddie Matthews, Warren Spahn, and, of course, the great Hank Arron.

The Milwaukee Braves soon fell victim to the same forces that brought them to Milwaukee. There were no teams in the South, and in 1966 the Braves moved to Atlanta, which is where they remain today.

Once the Braves moved, the genie was out of the bottle.

The next year, the Saint Louis Browns, who were perpetually one of the worst teams in the American League, moved. The Browns were so bad that when they won the World Series in 1944, new prisoners of war during WWII who reported that the Browns won the series were thought to be spies because prisoners who were in the camps thought it impossible that the Browns could have won.

Again, they were the second team in Saint Louis, and they moved to Baltimore, becoming the Baltimore Orioles, which they remain today.

In 1955, the Philadelphia Athletics made the move to Kansas City. Again, Philadelphia had two teams, but the Athletics were probably the better team in this case. However, that wasn’t saying much because they weren’t great.

The Athletics weren’t long for KC as they moved to Oakland in 1968. That wasn’t the end of the journey because the day before I recorded this episode, the A’s just played their last game in Oakland and will be playing in Las Vegas in 2025.

The biggest shock to the baseball world took place in 1958. New York, which previously had three teams, found themselves with only one when the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles and the Giants moved to San Francisco.

This was a seismic shift in that it finally brought major league baseball to California, but it did so at the expense of New York. Both teams are still in LA and San Francisco today.

The 1960s saw expansion and the creation of new teams, but relocation was still on the menu.

In 1961, the Washington Senators, who were also bad but not as bad as the Browns, moved to Minnesota and became the Minnesota Twins. They became the first team named after a state, not a city.

In 1969, there were four expansion teams, one of which was the Seattle Pilots. They only lasted a year before moving to Milwaukee to become the Milwaukee Brewers.

After the Washington Senators moved to Minnesota, a new expansion franchise was created in Washington with the exact same name, which was odd because the team existed the year before, but with a totally different roster.

However, they ended up moving in 1972 to Dallas to become the Texas Rangers.

Finally, in 2005, one of the other 1969 expansion franchises, the Montreal Expos, moved to Washington. Because they were in the National League, they took the name the Washington Nationals, sometimes a nickname for the original Senators.

Baseball has had many teams relocate, but it is hardly the only North American sport to have relocated teams.

In the NBA, one of the first teams to move was the Tri-Cities Blackhawks. The Tri-Cities was located in the area of Moline and Rock Island, Illinois, and Davenport, Iowa.The franchise was originally the Buffalo Bisons of the National Basketball League.

Because the community was so small, they moved to Milwaukee in 1950 to become the Milwaukee Hawks but then moved to Saint Louis in 1954 to become the Saint Louis Hawks. They remained there until 1965, when they moved to Atlanta, where they remain today.

The Minneapolis Lakers, named after the city’s 13 lakes, won five championships in the 1950s, led by Hall of Fame center George Mikan.

In 1960, they made the move west to Los Angeles. Oddly enough, they didn’t change the name of the team, even though most people don’t think of lakes when they think of LA.

In 1957, two small-market NBA teams moved. The Fort Wayne Pistons, moved to Detroit, where they remain today.

The Rochester Royals to Cincinnati. In 1972 the team moved west to Kansas City to become the Kansas City Royals. Finally in 1985 they moved to Sacramento, California and changed their name to the Sacramento Kings.

In 1962 the Philadelphia Warriors moved to San Francisco to become San Francisco Warriors, and then changed their name to the Golden State Warriors in 1971.

In 1971, the San Diego Rockets moved to Houston, where they became the much better-named Houston Rockets.

In 1973, the Baltimore Bullets made the short move south to become the Washington Bullets, who then changed their name to the Washington Wizards.

In 1978, the Buffalo Braves moved to San Diego and changed their name to the San Diego Clippers. In 1984, they moved to Los Angeles to become the LA Clippers.

In 1979, the New Orleans Jazz moved to Salt Lake City, a city which is known around the world for its jazz music.

After a few decades of stability, in 2001Vancouver Grizzlies moved to Memphis. In 2002 the Charlotte Hornets moved to New Orleans and became the New Orleans Pelicans.

Charlotte later got an expansion franchise called the Bobcats but then reverted back to the Hornets name.

Finally, in 2008, the Seattle Supersonics became the Oklahoma City Thunder, and the New Jersey Nets became the Brooklyn Nets.

Professional hockey had a great deal of stability up until the 1970s.

The California Golden Seals, located in Oakland, made the rare move east to Cleveland to become the Cleveland Barons in 1967. In 1976, they merged with the Minnesota North Stars. The North Stars wanted to move to the San Francisco Bay Area but were denied so the NHL could get a fee from a new expansion team….which they gave to the owners of the North Stars in 1991. The new team was the San Jose Sharks. The Sharks were able to draft about half of the North Stars.

Finally, in 1993, the North Stars moved to the big hockey hotbed of Dallas, where kids grow up playing pond hockey, to become the Dallas Stars. Minnesota was then awarded an expansion team, the Wild, which began playing in 2000.

The Atlanta Flames, located in another hockey hotbed, moved to Calgary in 1980. They got an expansion team in 1999 called the Thrashers, which moved to Winnipeg in 2011.

The reason why Winnipeg needed a team is that in 1996, the Winnipeg Jets moved to the Mecca of hockey, Phoenix, to become the Phoenix Coyotes. In 2024 they moved to Utah where they are currently known as the Utah Hockey Club, because they couldn’t come up with a name.

In 1995, the Quebec Nordiques moved to Colorado to become the Colorado Avalanch. In the ultimate slap in the face to the people of Quebec City, the year after they moved, they won the Stanley Cup.

In 1997, the Hartford Whalers moved from Connecticut to become the Carolina Hurricanes.

I’ll end this episode by talking about the National Football League, which has seen its share of relocations.

In the early years of the NFL, there were many teams in smaller towns that moved to larger cities.

The Decatur Staleys moved to Chicago in 1921 and became the Bears. It should be noted in the interest of full disclosure that even when they were in Decatur, Illinois, they were still a terrible team.

In 1934, the Portsmouth, Ohio Spartans became the Detroit Lions, and in 1937, the Boston Redskins became the Washington Redskins.

In 1946, the Cleveland Rams did their first of many relocations when they moved to Los Angeles.

In 1960, the Chicago Cardinals made a wise decision to leave Chicago and moved to Saint Louis.

For twenty-two years, nothing happened until 1982, when the Oakland Raiders left for Los Angeles to become the LA Raiders.

In 1984, the Baltimore Colts snuck away in the middle of the night, and I’m not joking when I say that, to become the Indianapolis Colts.

In 1988, Saint Louis lost the Cardinals when they moved to Phoenix to become the Arizona Cardinals.

In 1995, the city of Los Angeles went from having two NFL teams to zero when the Raiders and Rams left. The Raiders returned to Oakland, and the Rams moved to Saint Louis.

In 1996, the Cleveland Browns moved to Baltimore to fill the gap left by the Colts, who had left to become the Baltimore Ravens.

In 1999, Cleveland got an expansion team called the Browns. According to NFL history, it is an extension of the original Browns, except it isn’t.

In 1997, the Houston Oilers moved to Nashville to become the Tenessee Titans. Houston was then awarded an expansion franchise called the Texans, which played their first season in 2002.

In 2017, the San Diego Chargers moved to LA to once again give the city two teams, and in 2020, the Oakland Raiders once again left Oakland to move to Las Vegas.

If you are a sports fan in the US or Canada there is a good chance you might not have even been aware of some of these team relocations.

It might also get you wondering, is any team safe? Is there any team that will never leave their city?

Well, there is one team that will never leave because it is almost impossible for them to legally do so…..The Green Bay Packers.

The reason why it is almost impossible for the Packers to move is because of their unique ownership structure. They have several hundred thousands shareholders that would have to approve the sale or relocation of the team.

In the event that the team is ever sold, there is a poison pill clause in their corporate charter, which ensures any proceeds from the sale are donated to charity, so no one could ever make any money off of a sale.

The only plausible scenario would be one where the NFL simply kicks the team out of the league, and it has to fold. But, considering the team has one of the largest national fan bases, and regularly has some of the highest ratings for nationally televised games, in addition to the longest wait list for season tickets of any franchise, that is highly unlikely.

The movement of professional sports teams is a sad reality of sports in North America. For cities and fans that have lost their teams, it can be a bitter pill to swallow that stays with them for years.