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It's A Big Commitment For A Two-Month Thing
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It's been a couple of years since the Dodgers left Vero Beach to train in Glendale, AZ, and Port St. Lucie (motto: An Easy Two-Hour Drive To Anything Interesting!) spent a lot of tax money to keep the Mets training camp there. So, is all the public expenditure worth the money? Civic leaders say it brings in tourist money and new residents and creates valuable marketing, but nobody had actually looked into those claims. So the local paper did, and discovered this: Counties that don't have spring training camps do better than those which have spent the money to build or upgrade training facilities. Not the same, but better. All the usual suspicions apply: Money spent on baseball would have been spent elsewhere, tourists aren't coming just for baseball, the return's not worth the price. Yet, cities in Florida and Arizona are still competing to pour money into these facilities. (Stuart News)
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