Fort Myers, Fla. – With the start of the baseball season, memories of spring training for the Red Sox fade up north, but in this southwest Florida city, the team is still Topic A.
Their former stadium, plopped in a not-terribly-lovely section of the city just off downtown, is now somewhat of an embarrassment, as the city and county governments deal with the political and economic fallout from having the Red Sox relocate to a new and more glamorous playing and training facility elsewhere in the city.
The Red Sox played ball in City of Palms Park for 19 years, a piece of the spring training action that saw the Minnesota Twins playing in another part of Lee County, with other teams scattered about in Florida and the rest in Arizona.
Economists differ on the impact that such activities have on a given area, given that spring training is relatively short; that the teams tend to cluster in areas that are already tourism magnets; and that, according to constipated economic theory, folks will spend recreational dollars on recreation, be it baseball or something else.
The competition for spring training teams is fierce, with communities lusting after bragging rights and teams, not only within Florida, but also in a cross-country war between Arizona and Florida.
Swing And A Miss
The Red Sox decision to move had barely been conceived when Fort Myers began winking and swishing its hair at the Baltimore Orioles, a team considering a move – perhaps to the “old” Red Sox stadium. It didn’t happen.
Combine sports with the usual madness of “economic development” and you get a torrent of subsidy and incentives and kissy-face capital improvements to make nice to the spring training teams that come sniffing around.
Fort Myers and Lee County are left staring at a now-quiet stadium and nearby practice facilities that still have to be paid off – and, hopefully, filled up with something else. While the stadium has been given over to the county, the city has coughed up almost $30 million over the years for mortgage and other expenses – a fancy sum to entice a baseball team to play 15 or so games at the stadium before going up north to play real ball.
County officials are in a peculiar political situation. They are relieved that a new, lavish, prettied-up, and, of course, heavily subsidized new stadium and practice facility was enough to keep the Red Sox local. On the other hand, they have the financial and economic development responsibility for the old stadium, which sits there, mocking them.
At a planning session of the Lee County Commission earlier this month, the commissioners chatted up the sports authority executive director and an economic development official on short-term and long-term prospects for a stadium that in recent years has been sold out for almost every Red Sox spring training game.
The Twins stadium up the road has a Twins minor league franchise that plays all summer, when the big boys go away. The Red Sox have no minor league presence in Fort Myers.
In years past, the county has enticed a number of national amateur sports tournaments to use the stadium – and the sports authority predicts that those kinds of activities will increase. As a rock concert kind of venue, the county had been reluctant to open up the facility, for fear of damaging the field and making the sainted Red Sox angry. But, as the commission chairman said at the recent meeting, “they are gone now; they don’t care anymore.”
The city still has a $23 million mortgage liability on the old field. As the staff reported to the commissioners, the old stadium is, well, “old,” and would need a significant infusion of cash from the county to entice another major league baseball team to play there.
Across the country, the hope is that, at the least, “intangible benefits” accrue to communities that lavish bags of taxpayer gold on professional sports teams.
As an economic development official in Milwaukee put it many years ago, “without major league sports, Milwaukee would be like Des Moines.”
