What it means
Nobody in Scottsdale says Diamondbacks if they can help it. The team is the D-backs, two syllables, and the full name is for broadcasters and the backs of jerseys. It refers to the Arizona Diamondbacks, the Valley’s Major League Baseball club, founded as an expansion team for the 1998 season and the owner of the only men’s major-league championship Phoenix has ever celebrated, the 2001 World Series. “D-backs game tonight” means Chase Field in downtown Phoenix; in March it means something closer to home.
That is Scottsdale’s particular claim. Since 2011 the team has held spring training at Salt River Fields at Talking Stick, on Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community land ten minutes east of Old Town, with a Scottsdale zip code and a Pima Road address. For one month a year the D-backs are a neighborhood team. The spring training guide covers the park; the field manual covers how to work it.
Where you’ll meet it
On the Loop 101 signs for Indian Bend Road and Salt River Fields, in the Sedona red caps that replaced the purple ones, on bar televisions from April to September, and in the Talking Stick district, where the casino, the ballpark and the Pavilions share the Community’s western edge. In October the same park hosts the Arizona Fall League’s Salt River Rafters, which is the D-backs’ prospects under a different name.
Where the word came from
The name is a snake. When Major League Baseball awarded Phoenix a franchise on March 9, 1995, Jerry Colangelo, the Suns owner who led the bid, and his partners named the club for the Western diamondback rattlesnake, the Sonoran Desert’s best-known venomous resident and a creature every Scottsdale hiker has a story about. The shortened D-backs arrived at once and won; it is the form the team itself uses in its web address and on its merchandise, and the only one you will hear at a bar.
The club played its first game on March 31, 1998, against the Colorado Rockies, at Bank One Ballpark, the retractable-roof park downtown that everyone called the BOB until Bank One’s merger with JPMorgan Chase renamed it Chase Field in 2005. The early uniforms were purple, teal, black and copper; in 2007 the team switched to Sedona red, Sonoran sand and black.
What made the word stick was 2001. In their fourth season the D-backs won 92 games behind Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling and met the Yankees, seven weeks after September 11, in a World Series that went seven games. On November 4, 2001, in the bottom of the ninth at the BOB, Luis Gonzalez lofted a single over a drawn-in infield off Mariano Rivera to score Jay Bell. Johnson and Schilling were co-MVPs; some 300,000 people came to the parade three days later. No expansion team had won a title so fast, and no Phoenix men’s major-league team has won one since. Colangelo told Cronkite News in 2026 that the team was “carrying the banner for the city, for the state.”
The spring connection came later. The D-backs trained at Tucson Electric Park from 1998 to 2010. In 2009 the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community broke ground on a $100 million, two-team complex designed by HKS on its land along Pima Road, and on February 11, 2011 Salt River Fields opened as the first big-league spring facility on Native land, with the D-backs and Rockies as 20-year tenants. The Community, not Scottsdale, built it.
What it is not
The D-backs are not Scottsdale’s spring team; that is the Giants, at Scottsdale Stadium in Old Town. And Salt River Fields is not in Scottsdale, whatever the mailing address says. It sits on sovereign Community land east of the city line, which is why the ballpark, the casino and the Pavilions could be built in a row that no city zoning board ever saw.
The fine print
The record is clean because the team is young. The franchise fee and the 1995 award, the March 31, 1998 debut, the 2001 title in the fourth season, the 2007 color change, the 2011 move to Salt River Fields: none of it is disputed, and the only argument is over the nickname’s spelling, which the team hyphenates (D-backs) and the public mostly does not (Dbacks).
Salt River Fields’ numbers are the Community’s and the league’s: about 11,000 fixed and lawn seats on 140 acres, two 85,000-square-foot clubhouses, six practice fields per team, and a record crowd of 14,035 for a D-backs-Cubs game on March 16, 2019. The complex’s mailing address, 7555 North Pima Road, Scottsdale 85258, is the reason national coverage says the D-backs train “in Scottsdale,” and the reason this site keeps correcting it.
The team won a second National League pennant in 2023 as a wild card and lost the World Series to the Texas Rangers in five. For the Valley’s other teams and how locals claim them, see the Suns and the Cardinals; for the spring league the D-backs anchor, see Cactus League.