St. Petersburg, Fla. – Take in a Grapefruit League baseball game this year, and a Florida State University researcher might ask you how much money you’re spending and just how and where you’re spending it. The Florida Sports Foundation commissioned the surveys in an effort to update a nine-year-old study that showed spring training brought a $450 million benefit to the Florida economy. That $450 million figure has been a comfort to Florida legislators, who have twice passed legislation to spend a total of $150 million on the construction and improvement of spring-training facilities. Similar studies in Arizona have spurred that state’s legislature to approve more than $250 million for the same purpose. In both cases, state-level spending was matched dollar-for-dollar by local funds, which brings the public investment in spring training to roughly $800 million over the last decade. This year, in the midst of a poor economy, attendance at spring-training games is down nearly 20 percent. Florida officials are nervous about what the FSU/FSF study might reveal. Not only are ticket sales down, but Florida lost the Dodgers and Indians to Arizona this year and will lose the Reds next year. Whatever the researchers report, some economists simply won’t buy it. They think these spring-training subsidies are nothing more than welfare for professional-sports franchises, and that the studies constitute nothing more than pseudo-economics. For more than 75 years, virtually every news story that dealt with the financial side of spring training involved the costs to the team. From about $1,100 in the 1890s, the price of spring training rose to an estimated $9,000 by 1913. By 1960, the number had grown to $38,000 for hotel, food, and per diems alone — it did not include travel. A decade later it had jumped to $150,000; by the end of the 1980s, the estimate was $400,000. At the same time, attendance boomed. Today, thousands of fans attend a typical game, and total attendance is in the millions.

Insofar as anyone attempted to judge the economic impact of spring training on the host communities, it began and ended with these costs. Most of that money, it was reasoned, was spent in the local economy, on hotels and meals and in bars and nightclubs. The value of the city’s name in the dateline of faraway newspapers was always talked about, but impossible to quantify. There was the vague sense that baseball was benefiting from the publicity that spring training generated. No one, however, thought long or deeply about the economics of spring training. This started to change in the late 1970s. As Florida’s Grapefruit League and Arizona’s Cactus League crowds began numbering in the thousands instead of the hundreds, people started taking a closer look. The Grapefruit League building boom in the 1980s peeled the lid off stories about the economics of spring training. In 1987, the Florida Department of Commerce commissioned a study to determine the financial impact of the Grapefruit League. Delivered in the fall of that year, it showed a $295 million benefit as a result of March baseball. Ever since, officials have poured public money into spring training. More recent analyses also find large economic benefits resulting from spring training. The Cactus League Association completed a survey in 2007 that showed spring-training fans spending more than $310 million, up 54 percent from a similar study completed just four years earlier. The Florida Sports Foundation’s most recent figures are from the year 2000, when a study came up with its figure of $450 million. These studies reflect both direct and indirect impact. Direct impact includes salaries to local employees, taxes, and the purchase of local goods and services by the teams and the people who come to watch the teams play. Indirect impact is calculated using what economists call the multiplier factor. These studies assume, for example, that when a team pays a local employee $1 in salary, that dollar is going to be respent in the local economy and will create $2 of total impact. Different multiplier factors apply to different categories of revenue. For every dollar a tourist spends in a local restaurant or hotel, 90 cents is calculated to be respent in the local economy. The Cactus League numbers do not include spending by the teams; the Florida figure is aging rapidly. If Florida’s numbers jumped anywhere near what Arizona’s did between 2003 and 2007, the total impact is easily over $1 billion. But are these numbers real? “Politicians are making these claims, not economists,” said Phillip Porter, a professor of economics at the University of South Florida and the most oft-quoted critic of the economic-impact claims surrounding spring training. “There’s a group of sports economists, people who teach at universities and do very, very legitimate, frontline, historical, archival research in sports economics — people with no irons in the fire — and among that group of economists you’ll find uniform agreement that spring training and the presence of sports teams in a community have very little impact on jobs, on employment, on income and earning, and very little on spending.” Porter and his colleagues in the academic community express open contempt for the process used in these studies and only a slightly veiled contempt for the people who’ve done them. “These people may have some economic training, but they’re not professional economists; they’re not Ph.D.-level economists that are looking at how these models are built or how the models are done,” said Porter. “They’re the kind of people who do government-consulting jobs or work in government offices, like the Florida division of tourism.” The economic-impact studies use what is known as input-output models. There are a number of commercial models available. “They’re very user-friendly models,” said Porter. “You pay a few thousand dollars for the software and you can use the model. And you put numbers in the beginning of this model and out the other end comes impacts.” The problem, insists Porter, is that these models were not made to study events like spring training. “They’re good models for long-run, steady-state activities,” he said, citing the opening or closing of an Air Force base as an example. “The model makes good sense if you’re talking about something that’s permanent. But if you’re talking about something for six weeks? Nobody builds a hotel for six weeks. Nobody builds restaurants for six weeks.” He added: “The guy that’s using this model probably’s got a bias anyway. So essentially what he does is hire a bunch of [college] kids and they’ll go out to a spring-training game or any sporting event and they’ll ask the people: ‘Why are you here?’ ‘Well I’m here to watch spring training.’ ‘Where are you from?’ ‘I’m from Ohio.’ ‘How many days are you in Florida?’ ‘My family and I, four of us, we’re here for a week.’ And all of a sudden because he was at that game, a whole week’s worth of demand for Florida vacation is attributed to that event. In the model, what goes in is a week’s worth of spending by four people. It’s really not the case that these people only came to Florida because of spring training. They came to Florida because it was a great vacation place and, oh, one of the things they did one afternoon was go watch the local team in a spring-training game. You’ve got a model that is really inappropriate to the application, so what you’ve got coming out the other side is really meaningless.” But Porter and his brethren cannot convince the tourism industry. “I disagree with [Porter] 100 percent,” said Jeff Mielke, the executive director of the Lee County Sports Authority. “Because we see it. We go as a county staff to the Twins Fest in Minneapolis every January, and we set up this huge booth in the Metrodome, with a sign saying ‘Come to Lee County for Spring Training.’ And there’s thousands of people who come up to our booth and start planning their trip or say: ‘I’ve already got my tickets. We’re coming down there.’ And they’re coming down specifically to see the Twins play. There’s no other reason they’re coming here. Spring training drives its own individual tourism. And I know what [Porter’s] argument is. He says: ‘Well it’s just another activity; it’s people that are in the town anyway and are just finding another activity to do.’ Well it’s not true. And we know it. We’re up in Minnesota talking to thousands of people who are specifically coming down here for this reason, creating their vacation to come see the Twins. They’re going to do the beach because they’re here. But their primary purpose is to see spring training.” True, if major-league baseball were to move its spring training to an aircraft hangar in Alaska, there would be fans who would travel to watch — even Porter admits that spring training has some economic impact. But as long as there is winter in places like Minneapolis, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Boston — and America remains a land of some disposable income — Florida and Arizona are going to be buzzing in March, spring training or not. The only way to be certain of its real impact, Porter believes, is to look at what happens when spring training goes away. “Wait until somebody moves,” he says. “These are the things that provide natural tests for whether or not spring training provides the economic kick it is said to provide. If a team moves out of Winter Haven, say, what happens to Winter Haven? If next year it’s business as always with the same sort of sales and income and employment, then you gotta conclude that the presence of the team didn’t add anything to the community, because its absence didn’t take anything away.” Porter’s doubts are nothing new. Economists have long mustered arguments against the wisdom of investing public dollars in professional-sports franchises. But the keepers of the public purse strings in places like Arizona and Florida have ponied up nonetheless, and will likely continue to do so. A piece of Arizona legislation, Proposition 302 in 2001, even passed a public referendum. But while Florida governor Jeb Bush twice signed the legislation giving $150 million for spring-training construction, he vetoed it the first time it came across his desk, and he was a tough sell each of the times he did sign. “I want to help communities,” Bush said in 2006. “And I know people think these things are important. But my libertarian gene kicks in when people come to discuss these things.” “I believe he felt, somehow, some way, the money that the state was going to give these communities was going to filter to the teams,” said Larry Pendleton, the executive director of the Florida Sports Foundation. “Which it doesn’t. When I sat down and talked to him about it, I think he believed me, but I’m not sure. I don’t think he thought I was lying to him, but somewhere down there, he felt in some sinister way the teams are going to be able to get some of this money through the locals.” Former Governor Bush is not alone in his reservations. The facilities may be publicly owned, but they are hardly public property in the same sense as a park or a city-owned museum. Access is controlled and limited. Except on game days, spring-training stadiums appear more as fortresses of exclusivity and privilege than as public assets. And they are money losers. In every city or county with a spring-training facility, the bottom-line number on the public ledger for that facility is red. Every lease is different; the one constant is that they are written to favor the ball club. Communities once had more favorable terms, but when they started building new facilities and competing for teams in the 1980s, the balance of negotiating power shifted to the teams, and the leases reflect that. Many leases call for payments of $100,000 to $300,000 per year. Some split revenues from ticket sales, concessions, and parking between the team and the city/county; some give all that money to the team. Virtually all leases call for the municipality to absorb all operations and maintenance costs. Two-team facilities are a better deal for the community than a single-team complex. The two-team facilities in Peoria and Surprise, Ariz., both break even, or very close to it. For the rest, the number most often cited is $1 million: When all is said and done, that’s what it costs a community to own and manage a spring-training facility. Lee County, Fla., which manages individual complexes for the Red Sox and Twins, loses about $2 million a year. Yet there is not a single spring-training community that does not believe that the money spent is a sound investment and that the spring-training stadium is a jewel of a community asset. Why? Much of it goes back to name recognition. A national dateline six weeks every year is an asset difficult to quantify but impossible to disregard, particularly for a community steeped in the travel and tourism industry, or a new community looking to grow its business and residential base. Most spring-training communities in Florida and Arizona fit into one or both of those categories, and an association with major-league baseball and spring training gives them instant cachet. “For years I would travel and go to conferences, and people would ask where I was from, and I’d say, ‘Kissimmee, Fla.,’ and they’d say, ‘Where’s that?’” said Larry Whaley, the clerk of courts for Osceola County, who as county commissioner in the 1980s helped to bring spring training to Kissimmee. “Now I tell people I’m from Kissimmee, Fla., and there’s instant recognition. They all go: ‘Oh yeah, Astros spring training.’” – Charles Fountain teaches journalism at Northeastern University and is the author of Sportswriter: The Life and Times of Grantland Rice. This piece is adapted from Under the March Sun: The Story of Spring Training. Copyright 2009. Published by Oxford University Press.