The Lovely Morgan

Let's start something. Effective today, I'm calling the Dbacks' home park on Jefferson something other than what the latest multimillion dollar naming rights contract expects me to call it.


We're paying customers - and taxpayers. We not only pay the club's day to day bills, but indeed, paid for most of this stadium's construction. Why wouldnt we call the park anything we please?

It seems to me we're little more than lemmings, each time we dutifully ingest the corporate naming convention of an edifice we not only frequent, but actually financed. It's not so much the corporate appellation that bothers me, as it is the relative impermance of these conventions.

The bank or telecom, or whatever, pays for the rights, and that's fair - but passionate, deep rooted connections between a city and its ballteam can be trivialized by such ephemeral, short term business accords. The Diamondbacks are barely a decade old and we're already on our second stadium name. The way financial institutions collapse, merge and reinvent themselves nowadays, a third brand could easily be right around the corner. This seems inappropriate and counterproductive for a sport billing storied intergenerational appeal.

I say enough of that! Let's get behind a name that's fun, respectful of existing contracts, and permanent - reflecting the lasting connection between fans and the team. Here's my pitch:

Chase Bank & JP Morgan merged several years ago. Since Bank One Ballpark was renamed Chase Field, various wits have suggested "The Morg" (short for JP Morgan) as a sardonic snapshot of our venue's atmospherics. Hilarious name, but probably too cynical for diehard fans.

On the tail end of an interminable online flame war touching on this very topic, it came to my attention that a young lady named Morgan, the daughter-in-law of a certifiable Dbacks fan, apparently answers to the unusual but charming appellation, "The Lovely Morgan" - at least within her extended family.

Why not associate our precious park with a virtuous young woman, like they do for ships -or cool intangibles like 'liberty' and 'nature'? A woman with the same name as the bank holding company plastering its logo on the rafters for return on investment?

I have always loved the stadium. The welcoming brick plaza. The uniquely Arizonan rotunda. Inside, the mammoth green trusses, and breathtaking aperture of the roof, where telescoping steel beams evoke a delicate Chinese paper fan. The wide lower concourse circumscribing the entire playing green, beautiful sightlines within, and magical views of desert mountains from the upper deck.

Our ballpark is a beautiful, virtuous thing, like a lady.


















The Lovely Morgan
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Song of the Day - That's Not My Name (Ting Tings)