The Wild (NHL) technically play in St Paul, but considering that we share a border with Minneapolis and the term “Twin Cities”, one could really argue that it’s pretty much the same city.
I forgot the Lions moved from Pontiac so Detroit’s good now. And the judges say none of this Twin City stuff so Bye-bye Minneapolis. 
I’m a life-long O’s fan, but I’d still LOVE, LOVE, LOVE to see baseball in Washington DC again. You’d have to love the Senators.
I think we have a winner. Coors Field in Denver is about a mile or two from Mile High Stadium. The Pepsi Center is right across the highway from Mile High. Does Philly have soccer?
Denver has Div. 1 college hockey (DU), but I think thats it. You have to go to Boulder (30 miles) or Colorado Springs (Air Force Acadeny - 50 miles) to get Div 1 football or basketball.
No baseball team, either. 
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Since when is soccer the fifth biggest sport in the US? What are you using to determine that?
According to this site, for 2002 MLS got a .8 average rating on network television and a .19 for cable. Total attendance was 2,215,019, which is actually down from five years ago.
Let’s compare that to the WNBA (professional women’s basketball). Total attendance for 2002 was 2,362,412. Granted, the number of games and teams in the league are different. To be fair, their average attendance is down. I haven’t found one cite for the year in question, but doing some searching showed the WNBA getting around a 1.4 network and .5 on cable. Most of these stories talked about woeful ratings. What does this say about MLS?
That was an extreme example. The bigger sports like PGA golf and NASCAR completely dwarf MLS in the US. NASCAR can draw over a 4 rating on cable.
[mini GQ-sized rant]
I could go on with the stats, but I think I’ve at least showed some backing for my point. My point is that in spite of hearing how soccer is the “next big thing” since I was in elementary school, it’s nowhere near the “big four” in sports. MLS’s popularity in the US is closer to WNBA and arena football than the big four.
[/mini rant]
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Scratch off Detroit - while the Lions have returned from Pontiac, the Pistons play in Auburn Hills.
Me too- as far as the argument that it will hurt the O’s fan base, it seems like both cities are doing fine having their own football team. I heard that O’Malley supports D.C. getting a baseball team- we’ll see in the next few years how it plays out.
There’s also the D.C. United, so D.C./Baltimore may qualify for the “Big 5” unless you’re a purist and all teams have to be within the city limits.
So if you add NASCAR, RickJay’s list drops to:
Chicago - Chicagoland Speedway
Detroit - Michigan Int’l Speedway
Dallas - Texas Motor Speedway
Atlanta - Atlanta Motor Speedway
Phoenix - Phoenix Int’l Raceway
Miami - Homestead-Miami Speedway
Some of those may not be very close though, I was just guessing.
If you think it’s close enough, Infineon Raceway (Sears Point) for the SF Bay Area (It’s in Sonoma).
hehheh, be careful about your comparisons. By your logic, (and pretty much everybody else’s logic), the NHL does not qualify for the “big four”.
The real “big four” is one of two things: The “big three”, or the NFL, MLB, NBA, and NASCAR. There isn’t really much offense and defense in NASCAR, so I don’t consider it a sport, but at least everybody is on the field at the same time, so it’s much better than golf for being a true sport. IMHO, both are closer to competition than sport.
Back to the OP, if you don’t count the NY football teams, citing them as really being Jersey teams, then you have to count Jersey. Wait…does New Jersey have an MLB team?
NJ = No baseball.
Why soccer as fifth? Arena football is televised on a national station (NBC?)
Philly has five biggies within a 2-3 block radius. In addition, just north of Philly is the Pocono Raceway on the NASCAR cicruit, and just south is Dover Downs (The Monster Mile) on the Nascar circuit.
North Jersey (the NY Suburbs), has Jets, Giants, Devils and Nets.
Well, if you’re going to put the Giants and Jets in the New Jersey column, then New York doesn’t qualify as having all of the “big four.” Even though they play in New Jersey, both the Giants and Jets identify themselves as New York teams…I think you have to put them in the New York column. Or lump all the New York-New Jersey teams together, as we’ve been doing for San Francisco-Oakland.
I completely agree. Given my user name, I kind of felt that if I sold racing very hard in my other post, I would lose credibility.
If you get right down to it though, there is the NFL and all the rest. The NFL is way ahead of the other three. Surprisingly, as I was looking up the numbers for the last post, I saw some things that said that NASCAR was at least holding up ok against NFL games (in head to head events). NASCAR’s prerace shows were actually beating some of CBS’s pregame shows. Fox’s pregame show beat both of them fairly handily though.
And good for Angelenos. If the corporate or other well-heeled owners want a team in Los Angeles, let them finance it themselves.
Re: “four major sports.”
No one means to be putting down NASCAR, or, for that matter, golf, tennis or other sports which have a major following. The difference is that Major League Baseball, NFL Football (and CFL Football in Canadian cities), NHL Hockey and NBA Basketball are the major American team sports. Since they’re team sports, they are identified with the city they’re located in (or near), unlike the individual sports, which, popular though they might be, do not necessarily have a regional identification. At a NASCAR track, no one racer is considered the “home” participant.
There was once a “team tennis” league, but that went over even worse than Major League Soccer.