The Quakes Stayed In Rancho Cucamonga. Everything Else About Them Changed.
September 3, 2026
September 3, 2026
"We don't like it," said Steven Brown, a die-hard Dodgers fan who brought his family to one of the final games of the 2025 season. He wasn't talking about a losing streak. He was talking about the fact that the team he'd been rooting for at the Epicenter for years was, in every way that matters, about to stop existing in Rancho Cucamonga.
If you've been to a Quakes game this season and it felt a little different, you weren't imagining it. The jersey is the same. The stadium is (mostly) the same. But the organization playing inside it is not the one you watched last August, and neither is the one before that. Understanding why takes untangling a three-city swap that most fans never got a clear explanation of, plus a stadium rename that happened this spring and hasn't fully caught up in search results yet.
Here's what actually happened. The Los Angeles Dodgers had been the Quakes' parent club since 2011, sending a steady stream of prospects through Rancho Cucamonga on their way up, including Cody Bellinger, Corey Seager, and Walker Buehler. After the 2025 season, that entire Dodgers-affiliated organization, roster, coaching staff and all, packed up and moved to a brand-new ballpark called ONT Field in the Ontario Ranch section of Ontario. They took a new name with them: the Ontario Tower Buzzers, a nod to the city's aviation history and its proximity to Ontario International Airport.
So the team you knew as the Quakes for the last fifteen seasons is now playing under a different name, in a different city, a few miles down the freeway.
What replaced it in Rancho Cucamonga wasn't a new expansion team. It was the Inland Empire 66ers, previously based in San Bernardino as the Los Angeles Angels' Single-A affiliate, taking over the Quakes name and the Rancho Cucamonga location. And the 66ers' old spot in San Bernardino didn't sit empty either. It went to a relocated Modesto Nuts franchise. Three cities, three team identities, one coordinated shuffle, all engineered by Diamond Baseball Holdings, which bought the Quakes, the Nuts, and the Tri-City Dust Devils in December 2024 specifically to be able to make these moves. DBH now owns five of the eight teams in the California League.
The practical result is that the players wearing "Quakes" across their chests this year came up through the Angels' system, not the Dodgers'. If a Dodgers rehab assignment sends a big leaguer back to the minors this year, that happens in Ontario now. Rancho Cucamonga's ballpark hosted Clayton Kershaw, Manny Ramirez, and Adrián González on rehab stints over the years. That pipeline moved with the Dodgers affiliation.
Given how much turned over, it's worth being precise about what didn't change, because it's most of what makes a night at the ballpark feel like Rancho Cucamonga baseball:
Season ticket holder Cheryl Purdue, who's been coming to games since the ballpark opened on April 8, 1993, put it simply when the transition was announced: what keeps her coming back is watching future big leaguers pass through, and seeing Crazy J, Tremor, and Aftershock do their thing. That part of the experience didn't move to Ontario.
There's a second layer to this that even people who've kept up with the affiliate swap might have missed. In April 2026, the ballpark itself got a new name.
For thirteen years, it had been LoanMart Field, under a naming rights deal signed in 2013 with the Encino-based lender. That deal ended this year, and the Morongo Casino Resort & Spa stepped in as the new naming sponsor. The stadium is now officially Morongo Field at the Epicenter, unveiled during a celebration called Morongo Diamond Nights on April 3, 2026, one day after Morongo also became the presenting sponsor of the new Ontario Tower Buzzers across town.
That's not a small detail if you're trying to find the team online. Plenty of pages, including some of MiLB's own ticketing and schedule pages, still reference LoanMart Field months after the rename took effect. If you're mapping directions or looking up the seating chart, it's worth knowing both names are currently in circulation for the same building.
City officials quoted in the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin framed the whole shuffle as a non-event for attendance. Their read is that attendance has stayed level whether the team's parent club was the Dodgers or the Angels, and that the Quakes actually drew their best crowds in their earliest years under the San Diego Padres, back before either of the more recent rivalries existed. If that pattern holds, the novelty of a new team wearing a familiar name might do more for turnout than the specific big-league logo on the cap.
The new lease behind all this even planned for exactly this kind of two-team market, explicitly allowing a second baseball team to operate in Ontario south of the 10 Freeway. In other words, this wasn't an accident that happened to the city. It was negotiated years in advance.
If you grew up going to Quakes games to watch Dodgers prospects, the roster on the field now came up through a different system entirely, and the players who might one day be household names are wearing an Angels-affiliated jersey instead. If you're the kind of fan who was there for the Angels years the first time around, from 2001 to 2010, you're getting a rerun of sorts, minus the players you remember.
Either way, the parking lot, the walk in past LoanMart's old signage that's slowly becoming Morongo's new signage, the between-innings routines, and the general shape of a summer night at the Epicenter haven't moved an inch. Crazy J said it plainly when asked about the change: the team is going to be here regardless of which league jersey it's wearing. That's the part of Rancho Cucamonga's identity that outlasted a corporate ownership sale, a three-city franchise swap, and a stadium rename, all inside about sixteen months.
It's a small case study in how a place holds onto its character even when the institutions running it change hands entirely. That's not a bad way to think about a neighborhood in general. The businesses, the sponsors, and even the team names on the building can turn over, but the daily rhythm of a place, the reasons people keep showing up, tend to be sturdier than the paperwork behind them.
If you're curious what else has quietly shifted in Rancho Cucamonga this year, from new sponsorship deals to what's opening on Foothill Boulevard, that's the kind of local detail Carlos & Pat Samuelson and Associates tracks year-round. If you're ever weighing what your own home in the Foothill communities is worth, Get Your Instant Home Valuation and start with a number grounded in what's actually happening here, not a generic estimate.
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