WHEN BIG BATS ARE SECOND TO BIG DOLLARS: Hardball in the Grapefruit League

WHEN BIG BATS ARE SECOND TO BIG DOLLARS: Hardball in the Grapefruit League

FLORIDA WEEKLY PHOTO The Boston Red Sox have trained in Fort Myers for 15 years. Will it continue or will this statue of Ted Williams find a new home in Sarasota?

Up in Bean Town this week, in the heart of the Red Sox Nation where baseball is rated roughly equivalent to air, water and food as a life necessity, the Sox are jockeying for an edge over the New York Yankees and struggling even just to earn a wild card berth in the playoffs.

The two-time world champions are too hit-and-miss to reassure their fans as August arrives, and one thing is certain: except for a few team officials who have to plan ahead, nobody is thinking about life in the Grapefruit League, where it all starts each year.

But here the news has been not merely worrisome — why are the Sox struggling on the diamond? — but grim, for baseball fans: the Sox might move to Sarasota for better spring-training digs in the next couple of years, or they might not. Lee County officials who insist they're not in a bidding war to keep them here have been spending a lot of time scrambling around to find ways to please the team, either at City of Palms Park in downtown Fort Myers, or elsewhere in the county.

FLORIDA WEEKLY PHOTO EVAN WILLIAMS City of Palms Park has been the spring training home of the Boston Red Sox since 1993.

Their suggestions have included adding Fenway Park-like additions (a Green Monster wall, for example), acreage and practice fields at City of Palms Park, where eminent domain already proved a useful tool once, when the stadium and parking lots were built in 1992; or they could build another stadium outside of town.

One way or another, keeping the Sox will cost money, and paying for the stadium — the city of Fort Myers still owes $19.5 million in principal on it, and the county spends upwards of $1.26 million per year just to maintain it — has to happen, no matter what.

One question Lee County officials and others haven't answered clearly in the volumes of news stories following the careful fencing between world-class businessmen in the Sox organization and local government officials (who gave the team a $1 million out clause from their contract) is this: What will happen to the downtown stadium if the Sox decide to leave?

Asking such a question is probably tantamount to asking a ship's captain if he thinks any storms are lurking in his future — considered bad manners in the extreme, by the superstitious.

But the "captains" of this adventure accept the question pleasantly.

"I'm not looking at it that way," says Deputy County Manager Bill Hammond, a long-time Lee official for whom the spring headquarters of the Minnesota Twins at the Lee County Sports Complex is named (the Twins arrived in 1991, two years before the Red Sox).

"We are not in a bidding war. But if we were to lose the Red Sox, because of what's happened on the east coast with L.A. (the Dodgers) leaving, there has been great interest from a number of clubs, including the Baltimore Orioles, where Andy McPhail is general manager — he used to be a general manager with the Twins."

Whatever happens, in other words, it has to be baseball, both for economic reasons, and for the sake of Lee County culture, where baseball has played a significant role with various teams since the 1920s, say its apologists.

Describing the motivation of city leaders to raze about three square blocks of a blighted area downtown and spend millions putting up a baseball stadium, then-Mayor Wilbur Smith explained it this way, 15 years ago, in U.S.A.Today: "There was a feeling that we had let a good thing slip through our fingers (when the Kansas City Royals left town in 1987), so we had a sense of urgency to get a team. We were hurting. We were accustomed to spring games going back to the '20s with Connie Mack."

Smith's son, Ramsey Smith, who played with his three brothers on local Little League teams sometimes coached by their father, recalls that the Smith family traveled to ballparks across the United States to research them before City of Palms Park was designed.

"It was our favorite thing. We went from the Chattanooga Choo-Choos to Memphis to Fenway. All over. So our park resembles every traditional park in the country, in some way. And because he was mayor, we got to see those parks from the inside out — from down on the field, from the locker room, from the stands.

"Dad (Wilbur Smith, for whom the field is named at City of Palms Park), is a baseball fan, and the only thing he would ask if the Sox leave is that another baseball team come in.

"You can take the name off of it, strip the name from the field, but the structure will be there.

"I think the Red Sox are so big they have the ability to look beyond City of Palms Park. But teams all through the Midwest and up the Northeast coast who don't have sunshine and beautiful weather — they're interested. And this is a place you can buy a beautiful house and come back to."

Historically, baseball teams move around to take spring training — especially the Red Sox, who started the process in Hot Springs, Ark., in 1920.

Then they went to Tampa (sailing on a coastal cruise ship from Boston to get there, while Babe Ruth threatened to go into the heavyweight boxing ranks if they didn't pay him more, according to team lore); San Antonio; New Orleans; Bradenton; Pensacola; Savannah; Sarasota; Medford, Mass.; Baltimore; Pleasantville, N.J.; Scottsdale, Ariz., in the Cactus League; and then Winter Haven, where the Sox trained in the spring from 1966 until they were coaxed to come to Fort Myers, in 1993.

People in Winter Haven still remember their departure, but not as a costly affair, since the Cleveland Indians arrived the very next spring, forced out of a deal near Homestead when a new stadium built for their spring use was blown away by Hurricane Andrew.

"We haven't been without a team since 1966, but that's going to change next year, when the Indians leave," explains Joy Townsend, a Winter Haven city spokeswoman.

"When the Red Sox left, we didn't have an economic impact, since the Indians arrived.

"But from the city's point of view, when spring training no longer occurs in Winter Haven, our impact will be negligible. We subsidized spring training to the tune of about $1 million a year in maintenance, and a lot of people stayed over in the Orlando area, since our accommodations are limited. Improvements (to the stadium) have been expensive.

"So at first we had a lot of people who were sad to see spring training go, but now that it's pretty much a done deal, they've gotten use to it."

That attitude would not likely be one commonly held here — that the impact of a Sox departure would be negligible.

The Sox are nothing if not expensive, both for Fort Myers and for Lee County. But they're also worth a great deal of money to businesses here, as well as pleasure to baseball lovers, say officials and many residents.

Even Mayor Jim Humphrey, whose cashstrapped town holds the debt on the stadium, loves it.

"Bringing my grandson to the park for his first game is one of my favorite memories," he says. "And the overall ambience of the park and the fact that it's located downtown is something that as mayor I'm most appreciative of. To me, it's the best park you have in any of the spring leagues."

A lot of people feel that way, and don't mind paying for it. For 15 years, the Sox have kicked off the summer game at City of Palms Park by trailing into town ahead of thousands of groupies who spend their money all over Lee County. But that has had little impact on the neighborhoods around the park, which remain unvarnished.

And they'll do it again next March, too (wherever they decide to go after that), when suddenly Bostonians and New Englanders of all ranks will remember, again, who we are.

As Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy described the joyous impact each year to snow-weary Sox fans, "The Red Sox are back in Florida. There will be sunshine and green grass and hot nights and cold beer. There will be baseball."

That Boston-centric view of the world forgets, understandably, what the team and the dreamy, pennant-studded little jewel of a stadium — with its un-Fenway-like geometry (335 feet down the lines, 385 feet to the alleys, and 410 to center field) — has meant to the City of Palms itself.

In economic terms, its critics once used words like "boondoggle," and "catastrophe," but those words no longer appear in public conversations about the stadium or the team.

Tourism officials used a formula to determine economic impact that went like this, way back in 1994: They calculated an average out-of-state "traveling party" at 2.5 people, they counted 12,466 traveling parties that spring, they determined their expenditures at $1,138 per group, then they threw in another $1 million. That was money they judged the Red Sox themselves to be spending. They added the whole thing up to $16.4 million in economic gain, in Lee County.

Although those numbers are arguable, they've increased enough now to lead to estimates of economic gain each spring that range from about $25 or $30 million (that's with two teams in town, the Red Sox and the Twins, says Hammond), to a whopping $65 million that Sarasota officials calculated the Sox might bring to the community.

On the debt and maintenance side, though, the numbers are also high and mighty.

About four years ago, the county stepped in to help Fort Myers, which had bitten off more than it could chew, economically, says Bill Hammond.

"They were about to lose the Red Sox, so we brought our expertise, we hired a great groundskeeper, and we brought (money)," he explains.

The money did not include bond debt on the stadium. Instead, beginning in spring, 2004, it required the county to spend $1.5 million to repair leaks, electrical systems and to paint, and another $1.26 million annually for upkeep. The county also added seats in 2007, bringing the total to more than 7,200, which sell out.

The city, meanwhile, continues to struggle with stadium debt. Strikingly, the money taxpayers will ante up between 2009 and 2023 to get themselves out of debt for City of Palms Park amounts to more, in principal and interest, than the stadium was said to cost in the first place, a figure cited at $21.9 million by Christ Tenney, the city's budget manager, but widely reported as $24 million at the time.

That's because the city has been paying mostly interest and not principal until now, says Jennifer Hobbic, a city spokeswoman. Beginning in 2009, though, annual payments will be about half and half — half going to the principal debt and half to the interest debt, with paid out money chipping down the principal in increasing percentages each year.

The money owed in principal for the next 14 years is almost $19.5 million, while the interest owed will be almost $7.1 million, for a total of about $26.51 million, city figures show.

If the county obligation for maintenance, at $1.26 million each year, remains in that range, then county taxpayers will spend $17.64 million for their obligation in the next 14 years.

Meanwhile, the Sox will have to spend a minimum of about $320,000 per year for rent and extras for as long as they remain. Other teams would likely do the same, officials say, which would contribute $4.48 million to break down those debts, over time.

When all this started in 1992, sprung from the vision and determination of Mayor Wilbur Smith, the county population was about 356,000 — and that's increased by almost 300,000.

Smith promised the Red Sox a championship as part of the deal, says his son, Ramsey Smith, "and he fulfilled that part of the bargain. He even threw in an extra one."

But other-than-Red Sox use of the stadium, including by a top-rank minor league team, did not take place as planned, although a variety of peripheral baseball uses now happen at the park, doing little to defray costs.

For people like Joe Hastings, the assistant baseball coach at Boston College, all that is beside the point.

Getting to play at City of Palms Park against the Red Sox is a life-changing moment for his young players, who take the field against the Sox in the first game each spring.

"It's an honor for our guys to go down and play in that beautiful stadium against the Red Sox," he explains.

"And two times in the last four years we've opened up against the defending world champions there. The majority of our kids are New England kids — that's all they've ever known is Red Sox baseball. And the Sox do a great job of opening up to our guys. They stand around the batting cages and talk, they're relaxed, friendly.

"It's as nice a stadium as we ever play in, and we play in Fenway, too. But down there in Fort Myers, there're 7,000 or 8,000 people and it's jam-packed full. The fans are knowledgeable of baseball, and they understand it's an honor for our kids to be on that field."

Expensive or not, that's the real bottom line.

City of Fort Myers Annual Remaining Debt Payments City of Palms Stadium

Fiscal Year	Principal	Interest	Total
2009	906,403	966,107	1,872,510
2010	952,271	919,937	1,872,208
2011	1,002,106	870,750	1,872,856
2012	1,108,510	816,967	1,925,478
2013	2,238,380	731,518	2,969,898
2014	2,346,768	614,281	2,961,050
2015	1,715,408	509,194	2,224,603
2016	1,806,028	416,809	2,222,837
2017	1,001,648	344,279	1,345,927
2018	1,055,201	292,858	1,348,059
2019	1,108,754	238,759	1,347,513
2020	1,164,291	181,933	1,346,224
2021	1,229,746	122,082	1,351,828
2022	1,287,266	59,157	1,346,423
2023	539,501	13,488	552,989
	$19,462,282	$7,098,119	$26,560,401
Source: City of Fort Myers

 

STADIUM DEAL 2004

• Lee County to assume ownership of City of Palms Park and Minor League facility.

• Transfer of property is contingent on county entering a 15-year lease with the Boston Red Sox.

• Lee County is not responsible for any bond debt on City of Palms Stadium or Minor League Complex.

• Lee County will assume all maintenance of facilities and parking lots.

• Lee County will have all scheduling rights to both facilities.

• Parking lots to remain City property (however, licensing agreement guarantees parking for all events).

The following items are proposed as part of the agreement between the Boston Red Sox and Lee County:

• Agreement is for 15 years starting with Spring Training in 2004.

• Boston Red Sox agree to pay $300,000 per year in rent.

• Boston Red Sox agree to pay $20,000 per year for capital improvements.

• Boston Red Sox agree to share in any future improvements that are more than the $20,000 per year.

• Lee County to have complete scheduling authority for both the City of Palms Stadium and Minor League Complex.

• Lee County agrees to make improvements to facility using the $1.5 million from the Tourist Development Council (bed taxes). The improvements include repairing leaks, painting, water proofing and electrical.

• Red Sox agree to significant tourist promotions both during Spring Training and at Fenway Park in Boston.

The county also will assume about $1.26 million a year in operations and maintenance costs.

Source: Lee County