Standing with a group of Seattle Mariners executives, Chuck Armstrong scanned a quiet piece of desert 17 years ago and tried to picture what government officials believed it would become.
The site was a 145-acre tract in Peoria, Ariz., so far removed from downtown Phoenix that there was no direct highway access and no nearby hotel.
The locals, however, saw the proposed Peoria Sports Complex as the future hub of commercial, tourist and sports activities in what they predicted would be a burgeoning city that would grow around it.
Armstrong, the Mariners’ president, had a hard time envisioning such a thing on that hot July day in 1992.
“I could look 360 degrees in any direction and all I could see were orange groves, cotton fields, the broken-down old Brewers minor league complex and a microwave tower,” he said. “There was no shopping center, no houses, nothing.”
Spring training in Arizona was looking just as desolate.
The Cleveland Indians were moving to Florida from their longtime home in Tucson and the Chicago Cubs were all but ready to follow. It would have left the Cactus League with just six teams.
Cities in Florida were courting other teams — the Mariners, who were leaving their original spring home in Tempe, Ariz., looked seriously into moving to Homestead — and there were efforts in Texas and Nevada to rob Arizona of all its spring training teams.
“A few places were bragging that they were going to take them all away from here,” said Robert Brinton, president of the Cactus League and executive director of the Mesa (Ariz.) Convention and Visitors Bureau. “People in Texas were saying they wanted to get in on it, and Las Vegas was ready to take our teams. Everyone was saying in the early ’90s that the Cactus League was doomed.”
Spurred by then-Gov. Rose Mofford, the Arizona legislature created funding vehicles, mostly through tax on car rentals, to build new facilities. The Cubs got a new ballpark and stayed in Mesa, and the Peoria Sports Complex was seen as a cutting-edge facility that would become the first in baseball to host two teams for spring training.
“Spring training in Arizona had been extremely shaky,” Armstrong said. “They thought they might get down to only six teams in the Cactus League. But Rose Mofford foresaw this and helped spearhead the effort to change it. Arizona just stole the march.”
The Mariners settled into the Peoria Sports Complex in 1994 and not only did Peoria grow up and flourish around them, so did spring training in Arizona.
This week, when players report for their first official workouts of 2009, Arizona will host 14 of baseball’s 30 major league teams. Next year, it will be an even 15-15 split between teams training in Arizona and Florida.
Two new spring training complexes have been built in the Phoenix area — the $80.7 million Camelback Ranch for the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago White Sox and the $108 million Goodyear Ballpark for the Cleveland Indians and, next year, the Cincinnati Reds. The Dodgers, Indians and Reds are moving from Florida; the White Sox from Tucson.
Despite a difficult economy and ticket sales that are no better than last year, spring training continues to be a huge draw for tourists and fans who will plug hundreds of millions of dollars into the local economy.
A 2007 study by the Cactus League Baseball Association showed that spring training crowds contributed about $310 million to the region through hotels, restaurants, golf courses, shopping and other activities.
“I tend to look at it as the spring training stimulus package for Arizona,” said Brinton, the Cactus League president. “We didn’t get in on any of those other ones.”
The Mariners, Armstrong said, have sold roughly the same number of tickets as a year ago.
“It looks like this is still going to be a record year,” Brinton said. “Last year we had just over 1.3 million in attendance, and I think there’s a real chance of breaking 1.5 million this year.”
The Mariners welcome the growth of the Cactus League, particularly in the West Valley where they were the only team when they moved to Peoria in 1994.
Since then, other teams have followed.
The Brewers moved from Chandler to the Maryvale Baseball Park west of downtown Phoenix in 1998. The Rangers and Royals both left Florida and moved into the state-of-the-art Surprise Recreation Complex in 2003. This month the Dodgers, who made their home at Dodgertown in Vero Beach, Fla., since 1949, will play at the new Camelback Ranch in Glendale, joined by the White Sox, who are moving from Tucson. The Indians return to Arizona at the Goodyear Ballpark and will be joined next year by the Cincinnati Reds, who’ll move from Florida.
“We think it’s all good — good for the economy down there, good for the Mariners that more teams are moving to the west side,” Armstrong said.
There’s a dark side to all the growth. Baseball is drying up in Tucson.
The White Sox paid $5 million to break their lease with the city of Tucson so they could play at the new Camelback Ranch complex, leaving only the Arizona Diamondbacks and Colorado Rockies training in Tucson this year. The Diamondbacks, whose lease at Tucson Electric Park expires in 2012, are looking at sites in the Phoenix area (they’ve already pulled their Class AAA team out of Tucson).
The teams’ leases in Tucson allow them to leave if there are less than three teams training there, Brinton said.
“If Tucson is to survive, which we hope happens, they’ve got to pass the legislation and provide the funding so a team will want to come to the Cactus League,” he said. “That will strengthen Tucson enough to create that opportunity to have three teams once again. But they’ve got a challenge. In baseball terms, some may say it’s the bottom of the ninth inning and the score is tied, and others may say Tucson is a run behind.”
Brinton, however, remembers when the entire Cactus League was on the verge of falling apart nearly 20 years ago. Then the Arizona legislature provided means to fund new spring training facilities.
In the case of the Mariners’ base in Peoria, it became an economic hub for a growing city where once there was little more than an orange grove and cotton fields.
“I never envisioned it then,” Armstrong said. “But the building of the complex in Peoria sparked the whole thing.”a
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