As the Braves close out another year of spring training Saturday, they know they’ll return to Disney World for the final year of their lease next spring. Where they’ll train in 2018, though, they still don’t know.
“We have a couple of irons in the fire that are hot,” Terry McGuirk, the Braves’ chairman and CEO, said in an interview in his Turner Field office this week.
He was referring to the two Florida counties, Sarasota on the Gulf coast and Palm Beach on the Atlantic coast, that are in talks with the Braves about building a new spring facility by 2018.
“There are other irons, but we are focused on those two for the moment just because there are certain timetables of construction where we have to have shovels in the ground to be playing in 2018,” McGuirk said.
The Braves likely need to have a deal done in the next month or two if construction is to begin in time for a facility to open by February 2018.
McGuirk offered this assessment of the two potential sites on the Braves’ front-burner:
On Palm Beach County: "On the East coast (of Florida), we'd be the sixth team — and the fifth in that county. A sixth team (on that coast) would make a lot of sense because if you have five teams, (four) play each other all the time and one always has to go to the West coast. That's an incredibly inefficient way to run spring training. If you add the sixth team on the East coast, you would virtually be able to choose when you made that trip — if you even made a trip to the West coast."
On Sarasota County: "You plop the Atlanta Braves right down in the middle of the corridor where you have the ability to play up and down the West coast, and the access (to other teams) is incredible. And the kind of facility they're talking about building in both cases is going to be along the lines of what is out in Arizona. Florida historically has not kept up as well with the Arizona build-outs of spring training, and I think this will be a real credit for Florida, the kind of facility we're looking for and they're promising."
In both cases, state of Florida funds and local tax dollars are expected to be involved if a deal is made.
“We’re asking a lot of the counties, and they’re asking a lot of us,” McGuirk said. “This is certainly a public-private partnership.
"Until you get a solid 'Yes, and here we go,' there's always a gap. Full approvals take a lot of political discussion in those areas. … We're at a level where we're all sort of envisioning the future together of how it lays out, how it is financed, how teams interact with each other."
The Braves want to move their spring home from the Orlando area to get closer to other teams’ facilities and reduce travel time to exhibition games.
“I’m absolutely convinced that the Atlanta Braves as a free agent in Florida is a very valuable commodity,” McGuirk said.
While still focused on having a new facility open in 2018, the Braves have considered the alternative: a one-year stop-gap plan for that spring.
“If 2018 didn’t happen … we’d be fine,” McGuirk said. “I’ve talked to principals that would allow us to play.”
The possibilities apparently would include a short extension of the Disney lease or setting up shop for a year at an existing facility elsewhere in Florida.
“I’d say (a one-year extension at Disney) is possible,” McGuirk said. “There also are other possibilities, which we have researched and been advised that we could avail ourselves of.”
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