The New England Patriots of Mansfield.
The New York Jets of East Rutherford.
The Texas Rangers of Arlington.
The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.
Although all four of the above team names are geographically accurate, only one of them is an actual team name, as of today, and it's the last one. Pretty silly-sounding, right? Even sillier once you know the history. See if you can follow this logic:
In 1957, the Brooklyn Dodgers switched coasts and became what we now know as the Los Angeles Dodgers (the name, incidentally, comes from the fact that you had to cross several tracks that were used by streetcars at the time, so people in the area were known as "trolley-dodgers"). Then in 1961, Major League Baseball underwent expansion and awarded another franchise to Los Angeles, named the Los Angeles Angels in honor of a recently-departed minor-league team by the same name, who were displaced when the Dodgers came to town. So effectively, two major-league teams were located in a place which only four years earlier had been deemed insufficient for one major league team and one minor league team.
The Angels played in Los Angeles for a mere five seasons before moving to their brand-new park in Anaheim in 1966, and in the process became the California Angels. Ok, makes sense, no longer in Los Angeles, trying to appeal more to the general California market. Thirty years pass, and the ginormous Disney conglomerate decides it wants to expand its sports ownership business after creating the most embarrassingly-named team in US professional sports (the Mighty Ducks, named after its movie of the same name, released the SAME YEAR they got the team...how blatant can you get?), and acquires an ownership stake in the California Angels in 1996. The following season, the team's name is changed to the Anaheim Angels, ostensibly to capitalize on the fact that Anaheim is Disney central. Basically, they did everything except have a double-play combination of Huey, Dewey and Louie.
2002 rolls around, the Angels win the World Series, and Disney, having issues with their bottom line, cashes in, selling the team to Arte Moreno. Moreno waits two years, and then decides he wants to move away from the Anaheim name, and in an effort to expand his team's marketability, changes the name to...the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. Idiocy of having two cities in your team's name aside (the city has a 35-year agreement with MLB for naming rights, so Anaheim isn't going anywhere), if you're going for marketability, why not include the ENTIRE STATE? Will people from Los Angeles suddenly realize they have another team in the area just because it's named differently? Is this really "increased marketability"? How is targeting LA better than targeting California as a whole? Or hell, capitalize on another city's marketability. Why not the New York Angels of Anaheim? No, wait, Mexico City is bigger...or Rome! People like Rome. Yeah. The Rome Angels of Anaheim.
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