by fortbuckley on Jun.21, 2009, under Uncategorized
Spring Training In Tucson—Could It Have Been Saved?
While filling the propane tank this past Saturday, I saw the weekend paper’s headline, telling the news that we all knew was coming: 2010 will be the last year of spring training in Tucson.
I’m not sure it could have been “saved” in the first place. Here’s why I think that:
- Attendance wasn’t great. I’ll admit I’m no expert on spring training baseball (and I’m sure the true experts will soon rise up and correct my errors)…but I saw plenty of empty seats at the games I attended. If the local community really, really wanted to save spring training, shouldn’t we have turned out in greater numbers? We all knew it was on life support, that the D-backs and Rockies were looking for a reason to leave. Well, those empty seats gave them a pretty good reason. IIRC, the White Sox are drawing really good numbers (with higher ticket prices) at their new stadium.
- Apparently, the price for keeping MLB in Tucson was a brand-new stadium. OK—maybe Tucson Electric Park isn’t everything that MLB wants to see in a ballpark. But, IMO, it’s a fine stadium. No, it’s not Yankee Stadium—but Tucson isn’t NYC, either. Maybe it should have been built elsewhere in the city, but it’s there now. I blanched at the thought of having to abandon a perfectly good stadium in order to build another one closer to Phoenix, and I’m not surprised that many Tucsonans blanched, too.
- I got the sense that the MLB players weren’t too thrilled about being in Tucson to begin with. They didn’t like traveling, and Phoenix is a more “hopping” place for young, rich ballplayers to spend their months of March. There’s not much that Tucson can do to remedy that.
- Any thought that Major League Baseball might insist on preserving the spring training tradition in Tucson evaporated when I heard what happened to Vero Beach. The Florida town was the home of “Dodgertown,” the spring training complex the Dodgers used since 1949, when they played in Brooklyn. A half-century of tradition went bye-bye when the Dodgers moved to Glendale. If Dodgertown can close, then no spring training venue is safe.
Okay—the floor is open. What are your thoughts on spring training? Could Tucson have saved it? If so, how?
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June 22nd, 2009 on 7:43 am
Maybe a steroids vending machine would keep em’ here. Might help with budget shortfall too…
June 22nd, 2009 on 9:06 am
If MLB was such a good deal, why wasn’t it privately funded rather than subsidized by taxpayers?
June 22nd, 2009 on 11:30 am
No I don’t think it could have been saved. The great state or Maricopa is just too much to compete with. Frankly efforts to get it back is a slap in the face of Tucsonans. I hope the stadium tax never makes it out of the legislature because I am sure the idiot voters in this city would probably pass it once it was put to a vote. Guess what they build a new stadium and in ten years(about the time it took the sidewinders and all the other teams to leave) the next team will leave for bigger and better. I tend to be against government involvement in our lives and financing sports teams is one that really hacks me off. Get out of the sports business for good.
June 24th, 2009 on 8:00 pm
I do think the legislature should give us the chance to vote on a sales tax, or whatever it is we’d need to keep spring training here. If we vote it up or down, OK. But, we should get the chance to vote.
I do wonder if the Maricopa County faction in the state legislature is slowballing the bill, in hopes that it won’t pass until it’s too late. What good is passing a sales tax for a new stadium if the teams are already gone by the time we have the money? Something tells me Team Maricopa is thinking the same thing.
June 22nd, 2009 on 1:43 pm
Yes, sports teams are private enterprises and the public should only have to support them by choice in the form of buying tickets. We’re being held hostage – let them build their own stadiums and if the product is good enough, people will support it.
June 24th, 2009 on 7:55 pm
I fear that I’ll cause Hell to freeze over as I type the rest of this sentence: I agree with Leftfield.
I might feel a bit differently, and support a bond measure for a new stadium, IF we didn’t already have TEP. TEP is a perfectly good ballpark for major league spring training. I’m even open to making some modifications to suit today’s MLB ballplayer. Like, say, RADC MAXIMUS’ Steroid Vend-o-Matic…
But I’m not ready to pay for a new stadium in Marana, just so the ballplayers can be 15 miles closer to Phoenix. Does anyone really think that, if we could move TEP via flatbed to Marana, the D’backs and Rockies would squeal in delight? No, I suspect they’d find something else they didn’t like about being in Tucson.
August 10th, 2009 on 2:18 pm
We worship at the altar of Sports Socialism. They hypocrisy is abundant.