Braves Finally Look to Have An Invite to a New Spring Training Home
Sarasota County board votes to pursue spring-training deal with Braves
Continuing to search for a new spring-training home, the Braves are in serious talks with officials in Sarasota County on Florida’s Gulf Coast about building a facility there.
UPDATE, 11 a.m.: The Sarasota County Commission, in a meeting broadcast on the county’s website Tuesday morning, was briefed on the matter and voted 5-0 to authorize the county administrator to continue negotiations with the Braves.
The Braves and the county are discussing a large parcel of land in the West Villages development in North Port, in the southern part of Sarasota County.
“We are excited and appreciative that West Villages and Sarasota County are working with us to potentially secure a beautiful state-of-the-art future spring- training location for the Braves,” Braves President John Schuerholz said.
“This is an important step, but there are a lot of steps left,” Sarasota County Administrator Tom Harmer said after the county commission’s vote. “We are ready to keep working.”
Editors Notes:
Well, this has been a long time coming. It was much easier getting a new home for the major league club in Cobb County… court battles aside.
We’ve known for some time that the Atlanta Braves want to leave their Disney World Spring home… not necessarily because of Disney (though it seems that both sides are mutually committed to move on from their 20-year relationship and thus the Walt Disney Company is not putting additional money into needed updates and renovations), but because of the geography of the situation.
It’s just too far to travel anywhere in Florida to find an opponent for Grapefruit League contests.
The Houston Astros will leave centrally-located Kissimmee for West Palm Beach (on the East Coast) next season. The Nationals will join them, even though they were already on the Atlanta – further up the coast in Melbourne.
But it does illustrate the travel issue in that the travel time from the Nats current facility to West Palm Beach is nearly 120 miles and at least 90 minutes.
We’ve discussed multiple ideas and plans before, but this one finally seems like the real deal – with an up-front buy-in from the local government interests.
The location is ideal for a number of reasons:
- The closest competitors are American League clubs; only 1 other NL East team is in the vicinity
- Five opponents are located within an hour’s drive
- This puts 10 teams on the western side of Florida – ideal for scheduling.
All That Said…
The #Braves are talking to Sarasota County about a possible Spring Training site. But Palm Beach Co. and St. Pete are still in play as well.
— Mark Bowman (@mlbbowman) March 8, 2016
Here’s the problem with that:
- Palm Beach County has already spent a bunch of money to get the Astros and Nationals a new joint facility. The Braves went begging there recently, but had previously been told that they were too late in coming.
- We’ve previously reported that Pinellas County (St. Petersburg region) is kinda on hold thanks to major league baseball telling Atlanta to hold off until the Rays stadium situation can be resolved. But the Braves really can’t wait, and again, county monies are scarce to help.
So notwithstanding Bowman’s thoughts, Sarasota County has to be the front-runner right now – by a healthy margin.
It will take some time to get done – and probably means at least one more full year at Disney – but the betting here is that Atlanta finally has found a new Spring home. Let’s hope they can finish this up and start construction soon.