The Blue Jays and the taxpayers of Florida have built quite a facility!

Feb 26, 2021

Back in November of 2017, the Toronto Blue Jays and the city of Dunedin, Florida, officially announced that they had agreed to a 25-year contract that would keep the team's spring training home in the same place it had been since the team had originated back in 1977. For a long time during the preceding years, however, it didn't seem as though it was a marriage that was going to last.

"The Toronto Blue Jays are resolved to relocate their spring training base to a new home in Palm Beach Gardens, in the southeastern part of Florida," the Globe and Mail's Tom Maloney reported in August of 2013.

The club was, at the time, working toward a plan that would see them share a new state-of-the-art facility across the state with the Houston Astros. Many long-time Jays fans were distraught by the fact that the club would abandon Dunedin, the quaint-ish little burg that had become a magnet for Jays-obsessed snowbirds over the years, but beloved club president Paul Beeston insisted at the time that a move to Palm Beach Gardens was “an ideal situation.”

The Jays wanted to upgrade their facilities. They wanted to operate out of a single complex, unlike the setup in Dunedin. And Beeston boasted about the new site being near to Palm Beach International Airport, and within reasonable driving distance of the spring homes of the St. Louis Cardinals, Miami Marlins, and New York Mets.

What they really wanted, though, was to pay as little as possible for all of this.

The Jays eventually would sign a letter of intent to join the Astros, who were driving the process. It was reported in October 2013 that the two teams were 95 percent of the way to getting a deal done. But then, apparently, Beeston got cold feet — and not because of any sort of loyalty to Dunedin.

"Neighborhood opposition played a significant role in Palm Beach Gardens’ decision to withdraw its site from consideration for a spring training baseball stadium in January 2014," wrote Joe Capoz of the Palm Beach Post in January 2016. "But it wasn’t the only reason."

In his report, Capoz tells us that in December of 2013, with a City Council vote on the project just a month away, the Blue Jays sent a letter to Palm Beach Gardens City Manager Ron Ferris, informing them of the their intent to stay in Dunedin.

He explains:

The Blue Jays were worried the Gardens facility would cost more than $114 million and force the teams to kick in money, something Toronto officials claimed was never part of the deal.
“Clearly this is not in line with a commitment to construct a facility ‘at no cost to the teams,‴ Paul Beeston, the Blue Jays president, and Matthew Shuber, the Jays’ vice president of business affairs, wrote.

How can you not be romantic about baseball, am I right?

Of course, this kind of maneuvering is hardly just a Beeston thing. When it comes to big league teams and their spring training facilities, that’s pretty much the game being played: extracting public money from areas of Florida and Arizona with economies that rely heavily on tourism.

And with the door now open once again, Dunedin’s business community was happy to play along.

“Spring training is worth almost $80 million a year to Pinellas County, which also includes Clearwater, a city three times the size of Dunedin where the Philadelphia Phillies play. What share of that figure Dunedin specifically takes home is difficult to parse because visitors may stay in adjacent towns and vice versa,” wrote Brendan Kennedy of the Toronto Star in February 2016. “But there's no question the Jays are a boon to local businesses, (Dunedin mayor Julie) Ward Bujalski said. ‘They rely on the amount of visitors we have during spring training to help them get through the slower summer months.’”

The Jays staying in Dunedin was, by that point, not yet a fait accompli, but obviously it has happened. The team even ended up paying a whack of their own money to do so.

But, naturally, they also got a huge amount of funding from the city, from Pinellas County, and from the state of Florida.

In April of 2018, Tracey McManus of the Tampa Bay Times reported that Pinellas had agreed to give $41.7 million in bed taxes to club, "a pledge that amounts to covering half the project." McManus added that the city paid $5.6 million, with the state having pledged $13.6 million, leaving the Jays on the hook for about $20 million of the $81 million project (with the team also agreeing "to fund an additional $25 million over 25 years in maintenance, operations and repairs on facilities the city will own.")

That might not even be as good a deal for the Jays as the one Beeston backed out of — the Astros would eventually get their facility build, slightly to the south in West Palm Beach; they share it with the Washington Nationals — but it’s still a pretty incredible one for the club.

Last spring, with the opening of TD Ballpark, we were finally able to see the public face of that grand investment. It’s a charming little downtown ballpark with upgraded amenities. It looks quite nice! But on Thursday, the Blue Jays unveiled what they and the citizens of Florida had really been paying for: an incredible new training and development facility for baseball players in the employ of Rogers Communications, a company that, according to Forbes, has a $21.2 billion market cap and ranks 549th on their Global 2000 list of the world's largest public companies.

Yes, yes, I understand that those tax dollars are also supposedly going to ensure that enough Canadian tourist dollars to justify the investment will flow into the local economy for years to come. Unfortunately for Dunedin and Pinellas County, the economic impact of these projects is usually rather dramatically overstated. Both Field of Schemes and Shadow of the Stadium have written unfavourably about the locals’ end of this deal over the years, and that’s before COVID-19 destroyed pretty much all of the tourism dollars Jays fans would have brought to the area in the first two years of the new arrangement.

Hey, but the Jays at least did get what appears to be an incredible new facility out of the deal! *COUGH*

Here’s how the club described their new digs in a press release:

The Toronto Blue Jays today unveiled the new, state-of-the-art Player Development Complex. Sitting on a 65-acre site in Dunedin, FL, the complex combines innovative resources in a meticulously planned physical layout, to create a competitive advantage tool that will help the Blue Jays bring World Series Championships back to Canada.
The Player Development Complex features six full fields, two half fields, 20 gang mounds, 12 covered batting cages, a 155x150 ft. covered turf practice field, and a 6.79-degree, 168 ft. long speed hill.
The site’s 115,000 sq. ft. building houses Major and Minor League Blue Jays for the first time. With a physical layout where no detail has been overlooked, the design considers every step of a player’s journey to optimize elite performance. Key features include:
Two floor indoor/outdoor weight room (totalling 22,539 sq. ft.) with four garage doors that open to nearly 9,000 sq. ft. of partly covered outdoor turf and a 3,400 sq. ft. second floor cardio loft
Equipped with more than 40,000 lbs of weighted accessories and barbells
Major League Clubhouse (3,750 sq. ft.) with 72 custom, 8 ft. tall wood lockers
Three Minor League locker rooms totalling 219 total lockers
Hydrotherapy room (2,495 sq. ft.)with a 15x45 ft. custom depth pool at four, five, and six ft. plus two hot and two cold tubs at 4 ft. depth
Kitchen (2,436 sq. ft.) and two dedicated Major/Minor League dining rooms totalling nearly 5,000 sq. ft.
Three sport science labs for applied research, movement, and pitching
Three discipline work rooms for hitting, pitching, and baserunning/defense
On site barber shop, vendor room, Minor League player lounge, and grab ‘n go fridges and nutrition stations throughout the complex

My blood would probably be boiling if I’d just watched my city, county, and state give half the funds to do all this to a gigantic corporation that doesn’t even do business in the damn country! But as a Jays fan? I can’t exactly deny that it look pretty friggin’ awesome, or that I hope it can be game-changing both in terms of player development, but also when it comes to helping to recruit the best free agents in the game.

The Jays have kindly shared a whole bunch of pictures of their new digs. Here are some of what I thought were the highlights.