Whether you are sending TTM requests or fan mail, team addresses can be important for any collector. But finding addresses for teams can be a chore. While sites for the leagues help to create a collection of the team websites together, finding a team’s address within their own site can be challenging sometimes. That causes a lot of digging deep into a site to try to find contact information and then going back to the league’s site to try for the next team.
If you are just looking for one address at a time, Google can be helpful. You can search for things like “Where do the <team name> play?” or “<team name> mailing address” and many times it will be the first result. Sometimes it’s even called out like the Google search likes to do. I find that’s a great option for verifying the addresses as I use them. But I generally try to look for addresses or verify them in bulk to have them handy in my spreadsheets and I needed an easier way to collect them together. This is usually on my pre-season to do list for all sports.
To that end, I’ve created pages to provide lists of teams for each of the major professional leagues (baseball, football, basketball, hockey) as well as a good chunk of minor league baseball teams. Hopefully you find this as a helpful resource. I update team addresses for myself about once a year per league and I plan to keep these lists up to date as I do that.
Team Address Lists by League
Here are links to each league’s lists:
– Major League Baseball (MLB) Team Addresses
– Major League Baseball (MLB) Spring Training Addresses
– Minor League Baseball (MiLB) Team Addresses (Coming… at some point)
– National Football League (NFL) Team Addresses
– National Basketball Association (NBA) Team Addresses
– National Hockey League (NHL) Team Addresses
How To Find Team Addresses / Fan Mail Addresses
If you have trouble finding an address on your own, or if you are just trying to doublecheck or verify an address you see on the pages I’ve provided, there are a couple tricks I’ve tried. The first option I always tend to try a “Contact Us” page first. That’s the most obvious place to start. Many teams will try to feed you to an electronic form or email and not provide an address for fan mail. Sometimes you need to look a little deeper.
There are a lot of times where teams provide multiple addresses as well. One may be for a front office while another might be the stadium. Or maybe they provide the stadium and the practice facility. If they list something as the fan mail address or in some way they word how to send mail to players, then you’re golden!
The second place I will try is an “A-Z Guide” that some teams will have. I’ll look under “Fan Mail” “Mailing Address,” or “Stadium” for the information. That can be a long list though, especially if it’s not where you expect it to be.
The last place I look if none of that works out is to resort to the actual stadium and trying to find directions. Many times you can be led to a Google Map or something like that and you can find the address there. This tends to be the case when it comes to minor league teams. The smaller the team though, the less likely it is that they have an address listed. Of course, the smaller the team the less likely it is that there is a player or coach who you want to send an autograph request to, but you never know.
Fan Mail to Coaches / Front Office Staff
Don’t forget that former players can be coaches… or broadcasters, or front office staff, or just can be around their former teams in general in some cases. Coaches, broadcasters, and front office staff are all a great source for TTM autograph attempts. They certainly have been for me over the years. Keep up with the staff on the team sites or Wikipedia. The information is out there for all of these positions and you never know what you’ll find until you start looking.
Team Address Best Practices
No matter how you find an address, the number one best practice that I recommend: verify it. Over the last few years I have taken to trying to verify all of the addresses I find. I keep my own list of addresses offline and then before I use them off my list, I verify them. Normally that means going to sportscardforum.com or sportscollectors.net and trying to find the best address to use.
While that is especially the case for someone’s personal address, I apply it to team addresses as well. Checking to see where a player tends to sign from or where a team likes to get its mail is very important. I would say that this has become one of the things that has increased my success rate recently. I’ve scrapped attempts because I find that I can’t verify an address to my liking.
The other best practice that I have is to be mindful of the time of year. Using a “Captain Obvious” example, don’t send a baseball attempt to the Spring Training address in September. To be a little more specific to that example, don’t send to Spring Training at the end of March. Spring Training dates are well advertised, as are the regular season schedules, so be mindful of those. Sending ahead of those dates can be fine but be wary of the end different seasons.
For example, if I am sending to Spring Training, which generally starts early to mid-February, I might start sending attempts in January. But I will stop sending attempt maybe by the first week of March. Similarly for the baseball season, I might then switch to sending to the regular stadiums by mid-March and stop sending sometime in September. But I would also be wary of sending to current players that could be traded around the trade deadline, that’s always tricky.
The last best practice I would is to be careful of the name of a stadium and other special information that can be with an address. There are times I tend to leave things like the name of the stadium, just to be sure.
I don’t know how much it impacts your mail if you address something to “AT&T Park” with the same physical address but the name of the stadium changed to “Oracle Park”. But sometimes leaving it off there is a good idea. When I address the envelope it will look as follows:
Player Name
c/o Team Name
Street Address
City, State Zip Code
Or
Player Name
c/o Team Name
Stadium Name / Department
Street Address
City, State Zip Code
What do I mean by department, you might ask? Well, sometimes for broadcasters you might find people have had success with “Broadcasting Department” or things of that nature. I find this extra information useful when sending to a school address. Many times you are trying to send things to the Athletic Department for example.
To recap the best Practices:
– Always verify the address you use before sending
– Keep in mind the date and what type of team address you are using and the time of the season
– Be careful how you address the envelope related to any team or stadium information that might be needed
Hopefully you found this information helpful. I’ll do my best to keep you updated. Good Luck!
