The Pima County Sports and Tourism Authority is wooing the Baltimore Orioles on a spring-training move, as early as 2010.
The Pima County Sports and Tourism Authority is wooing the Baltimore Orioles on a spring-training move, as early as 2010.
It will be a hard sell, to be sure. The future of spring training in Tucson is extreme doubt; the Arizona Diamondbacks and Colorado Rockies are planning on a move to the greater Phoenix area as soon as 2012.
It is increasingly certain the Orioles will move spring training from Fort Lauderdale; it's a matter of when and where. Sarasota is pitching Ed Smith Stadium as being ready for the Orioles next spring with renovations down the road. That has some appeal for the Orioles, whose minor leaguers already train at Sarasota's Twin Lakes Park. Fort Myers is pitching City of Palms Park as an Orioles home once the Boston Red Sox vacate for a new training facility (in fact, the Lee County Board of Commissioners is meeting on that very topic today), but that won't happen until 2011 at the earliest.
But Tucson is a stretch. The Colorado Rockies and Arizona Diamondbacks are moving out of Tucson as early as 2011, which would leave the Orioles alone 110 miles south of Phoenix. The move in spring training is to centralize teams, not leave them as outliers.
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