Could the Atlanta Braves be headed back to West Palm Beach, Fla., for spring training?
The Braves are weighing the possibility of a return to Palm Beach County after the Houston Astros and Washington Nationals received local funding last year to construct new facilities in the area, the Palm Beach Post reported this week.
For 35 years, the Braves had their spring headquarters in West Palm Beach before leaving for the Orlando area in 1998. The team has hired consultants to gauge community interest in the Braves returning.
“We have a chance for a homecoming now, we hope,” Braves president John Schuerholz told The Post. “We have engaged with groups in various communities, and obviously, by our acknowledgement that we have hired a lobbyist in Palm Beach County, that says we are interested there as well.”
No formal discussions have been held with local officials and no site is currently under consideration, but there is interest in the southern part of the county from Lake Worth to Boca Raton. No major league teams currently are located in that area.
“It signals that we feel that there is some level of interest (in the Palm Beach area),” Schuerholz told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Our lobbyist, Tom McNicholas, believed that to be the case, and we are hopeful that is the case.
“We have considerable numbers of years under our belts of experience in that wonderful community. We haven’t really gone any further than to hire a lobbyist to help us figure our way through the Palm Beach County political system and to truly sort of measure what level of interest there might be.
“But we are open-minded and obviously interested in pursuing any community, especially one we know as well as we know Palm Beach County, that might have an interest in having the Atlanta Braves come to their community — or in this case come back to their community. We will work as hard and fast as we can with the lead work of our lobbyist and see where we go.”
Palm Beach County used $113 million in tourism money last year to help the Nationals and Astros with the Ballpark of the Palm Beaches, a $144 million complex that will be shared by the two teams when it opens next spring.
County administrator Verdenia Baker told The Post that no meetings have been held with the Braves.
“I am not aware of any county land or any county revenue sources,” she said.
Schuerholz wants the Braves to train on either coast to be clustered around other teams in order to avoid long bus trips and time away from the field. With the Astros leaving Kissimmee and the Nationals moving from Viera in 2017, that will leave the Detroit Tigers in Lakeland as the only team somewhat close to the Braves’ current complex in DisneyWorld.
In September, the Braves disclosed plans for a spring complex on a former landfill north of St. Petersburg, but the proposal appears to have stalled.