El Cardquistador

For the passionate baseball lover, Phoenix, Arizona, seems like paradise. We have Spring Training, beautiful weather, and a local team that made the World Series in 2023. But for those of us who would try to support the Arizona Diamondbacks? It’s pointless — it’s a city that fundamentally belongs to the Chicago Cubs and the Los Angeles Dodgers.

This isn’t D-backs Country; it the rival’s Rival Country. The D-backs are caught in a perfect storm of transient forces that makes it impossible to build a deep, vibrant fan culture.

This Is Cubs and Dodgers Country

The primary problem is simple: the D-backs are the home team in name only. Phoenix is a city where rival allegiances are not just tolerated—they are celebrated and reinforced by massive cultural infrastructure. When the Dodgers come to town, the game is a “home game” for the visitors. Chase Field has been called “de facto Dodger Stadium East”—and for good reason.

We watch the D-backs play in a sea of blue, a testament to the sheer number of Southern California transplants. Walker Buehler received a standing ovation from Dodgers fans at Chase Field, as if he were pitching in Los Angeles. The highest-attended series of the year becomes a hostile, frustrating environment for the few local faithful.

The Cubs have led Cactus League attendance for 12 consecutive seasons, averaging 13,000 fans per game in 2025—outdrawing even the hometown Diamondbacks. Combined with the Dodgers’ 11,000 fans per game, these two rival franchises draw more than double the D-backs’ Spring Training attendance in Arizona. Also, I can drive by dedicated Cubs bars with crowds chanting, while searching for a true D-backs bar often leads to a generic sports grill. The rival bar scene is more vibrant and established than the local one.

Loyalty Is Just a Stop on the Freeway

The Phoenix metro area’s rapid growth means most residents arrived already committed to an older, historic franchise. Why invest passion in the D-backs when your original team—the Cubs or the Dodgers—is being actively celebrated down the street? There’s a dark joke that captures Phoenix perfectly: if you want to get someone a truly Phoenix gift, you get them an “I Love Chicago” shirt. This creates an emotional ceiling on local support: The D-backs are treated as a secondary team or a summer curiosity by a vast number of residents who already own a lifetime’s worth of Dodgers or Cubs history. When the D-backs struggle, it’s not that we revert to our original teams—we were never really watching in the first place. It takes the dominance of a World Series D-backs team just to turn our heads, and even that attention is temporary.

Player Transience Breaks the Connection

In the modern MLB economy, most teams can’t keep their stars when the big-market teams come calling. The D-backs, classified as a mid-market team despite Phoenix being the 11th-largest metro area in the U.S., are competing against large-market franchises like the Cubs and Dodgers with century-old fanbases and significantly deeper pockets. Being a fan is never rewarded in the long term, and we’re no longer in the rabbit-ears era where you watched your local team because that’s all you could get. This is a 200-channel, thousands-of-streams society—we can aim our antenna at what actually matters to us.

So why would anyone choose to invest in a player? With a team most of the city doesn’t care about, playing for a franchise he’ll likely leave when his contract runs out, in front of fans who will themselves move to another metro area within a few years. It’s transience stacked on transience.

This cycle of developing talent for richer markets makes it nearly impossible to build the historical legends required to combat the centuries of history carried by the Cubs and Dodgers logos visible on every corner. You can’t build Ernie Banks or Sandy Koufax when your stars leave after six years.

The Phoenix baseball environment is a perfect storm of who cares. It’s a young team in a rapidly growing city with a short baseball history full of fans who already have a team, watching players who won’t stick around.

Most of us arrived here already loyal to someone else, and there is nothing Phoenix baseball can do, in this era, to change that. The D-backs don’t care about my inherited loyalty, and I don’t care enough about their young history to swap it for my own. I have never bothered with the D-backs because there is no draw and no connection.