INDIAN RIVER COUNTY — The Palm Beach County Commission’s decision two weeks ago to provide $108 million in public funds to build a two-team, $135 million complex for the Washington Nationals and Houston Astros probably will keep spring training on Florida’s East Coast, a 60- to 90-minute drive away.
But it’s unlikely to bring big-league baseball back to Vero Beach, the spring-training home of the Los Angeles Dodgers for 61 years.
“We have not heard from any team regarding any interest in coming here,” Historic Dodgertown Vice President Craig Callan said.
In fact, since the Dodgers abandoned Vero Beach on St. Patrick’s Day 2008 and moved their spring-training operation to the Arizona desert, only one team has engaged Indian River County in negotiations to replace them.
As county officials would later learn, however, the Baltimore Orioles were never serious about moving here.
They merely were using Dodgertown for leverage in their negotiations with Sarasota, where they have trained since 2009.
And with major league team owners now using spring training as an additional revenue stream, the Orioles’ charade was probably Vero Beach’s last real chance to get back into the Grapefruit League.
The county, in its negotiations with the Orioles, had offered to spend more than $12 million to renovate a quaint-but-outdated Holman Stadium, even though such a project likely would’ve cost twice that amount. That was six years ago.
Now, any team that might seriously consider moving its spring-training headquarters to Historic Dodgertown would want a new stadium – and a major league team as a partner.
But unlike Jupiter’s Roger Dean Stadium complex, which serves as the Grapefruit League home of the Miami Marlins and St. Louis Cardinals, Historic Dodgerdown isn’t equipped to handle two teams.
“We’re a good facility that could accommodate a major league team for spring training, but we’re the old model,” Callan said. “Most teams nowadays want a two-team facility, not only for convenience but also because that’s where they make money – by having one team playing at home and operating every day for the month they’re here.”
To build a two-team facility in this county would cost at least $125 million, even if the land were donated.
Based on budget constraints in recent years, the county doesn’t have anywhere near the money needed to fund such a project.
“What wouldn’t work for us would be to have one of those teams come in here for a year or two while they’re waiting for the new facility to be built,” Callan said.
“That wouldn’t make sense for us because we’d have to block out those two or three months – busy months for us – and some of the business we’ve worked so hard to build up these past few years would go somewhere else.
“We’d have to rebuild our business, just to accommodate a team for a year or two,” he added, “and that’s just not worth it.”
So, unless the economics of Major League Baseball change drastically, spring training probably won’t return to Vero Beach.
Instead, Historic Dodgertown will continue to operate as a multi-sport facility that attracts teams, tournaments and other events on a year-round basis.
“If spring training were to come back here,” Callan said, “our business model would go away.”