As spring training baseball games begin in Lee County, Collier County baseball fans once again will be on the outside looking in on the action— but not for lack of trying. During the past 15 years, Collier County business leaders have attempted to bring some of the Grapefruit League’s spring training games closer to Naples. Dalliances in 2009 with the Chicago Cubs and in 2016 with the Atlanta Braves and Toronto Blue Jays, however, resulted in two of those three teams getting new, state-of-the-art complexes elsewhere: The Cubs stayed in Arizona, the Braves moved from Lake Buena Vista to North Port and the Blue Jays stayed in Dunedin.

The Boston Red Sox begin their spring schedule with a 1:05 p.m. game against Northeastern University on Feb. 24 and the Tampa Bay Rays at 1:05 p.m. Feb. 26 at JetBlue Park at the Fenway South Sports Complex in Lee County.

The Minnesota Twins do the same at 1:05 p.m. Feb. 25 against the Rays at the Lee County Sports Complex.

Both teams are sure to have Collier County-based fans in the stands. That’s because about 9.4% of Red Sox spring training season ticket holders come from Collier County addresses, said Shawn Smith, the new director of Florida operations for the Fenway South complex. About 7% of Minnesota Twins spring training season ticket holders come from Collier County, said Paul Froehle, the Twins vice president and director of ticket operations. But that number is likely to be higher, he said.

“Collier County is a big part of spring training,” Froehle said. “Whether it be Collier, whether it be Lee, Charlotte County, all of these people travel a variety of miles to see different facilities. If you have an account holder from Minneapolis, for example, we don’t have their Naples address or Fort Myers address or Bonita Springs address.”

There’s a Minnesota breakfast club that meets every Friday at the Strand in Naples. There are more than 1,000 members, and many of them flock to Twins games each spring, said Mark Weber, Minnesota’s director of Florida operations.

“I go down there almost every week for the Minnesota breakfast club,” Weber said. “It’s in its 59th year. It started in 1964. Every Friday morning, we meet at the Strand in Naples. And this year, it’s the Who’s Who of Minnesota as guest speakers.”

Tony Oliva and Rod Carew, both baseball Hall of Famers, are guest speakers who will be traveling to Collier County to speak. But otherwise, Collier County citizens must do the traveling to get their fix of spring training baseball.

It didn’t have to be that way. In 2009, sports radio host David Moulton wrote a newspaper column urging Collier County to attract the Cubs for spring training at a new stadium. A week later, that column set Naples business leaders in motion to explore the idea.

“The business community in Collier County and a couple of politicians grabbed the idea and ran with it,” said Moulton, who now lives in Jacksonville, where he does the Miller and Moulton Show on ESPN Radio on weekday mornings. “They nearly pulled it off. The Cubs met with them, negotiated with them.”

Moulton said the new and current owners of the Cubs, the Ricketts family, were convinced to stay in Arizona at what’s now called Sloan Park, which opened in 2014 in Mesa and seats up to 15,000 fans.

Gary Price, a former Naples city councilman and executive with Fifth Avenue Family Office, which helps affluent Naples families manage their wealth, didn’t succeed with his efforts to bring the Cubs to Collier County.

“My business partners and I thought it would be a great idea to get spring training to Collier County,” Price said of 2009 when he connected with the Cubs. “It had nothing to do with my city council role. We took it on ourselves. Someone knew had a great connection to the Ricketts family. I wasn’t necessarily a Cubs fan, but I’m a Collier County fan. We got to meet all of them. They came down. They were torn between staying in Arizona (and moving here).

“There was probably a lot of pressure on them to stay in Mesa. They’re a huge draw; they draw 10,000 fans to a game. A lot of the other teams draw 5,000. The interesting twist about that, is I never wanted to be a stalking horse for them. I didn’t want to be used by them to get a better deal if they never had any intention of coming here. They assured me they had a real interest in Southwest Florida.”

In 2016, Price and his business partners tried giving it another go, this time with the Braves, and then later the Blue Jays.

“It was John Schuerholz who reached out to me,” Price said of the Braves executive. “We met John. He had some interest in coming to Southwest Florida. We started talking. We looked at a couple of locations. Then we started thinking, what if we could get two teams? If we had two teams contributing and using the facility, we would get more use out of it during spring training. That’s when we looked at the Blue Jays.”

A two-team facility would cost about 30% more to construct.

The Braves instead chose to move into a new facility in North Port, where CoolToday Park opened in 2019.

By then, Collier County took what could have been a spring training site and turned it into the Paradise Coast Sports Complex at 3940 City Gate Blvd., a multi-use youth sports facility. That’s exactly where Price and his fellow investors would have lured the Cubs and then later the Braves and Blue Jays.

“We got a lot of pushback from it politically,” Price said. “‘Why are you going to use tax money to pay for millionaire baseball teams?’ I thought we could have the best of both worlds. We could have spring training. We could have something the county could be proud of. And you could find other sources of revenue to pay for it. No sour grapes; the county made the decision they did. We all went on with our lives.”

Rick Lo Castro, in his second year as a Collier County commissioner, said the Paradise Coast Sports Complex would have been the perwe fect site for a spring training complex, as well as an adjacent property that will become Great Wolf Lodge. He was the only commissioner who voted against a $15 million incentive for Great Wolf Lodge, and he wasn’t in office when the sports complex was voted upon.

Now that those two sites are off the table, landing a Major League Baseball team for spring training in Collier County in future years would be much more difficult, he said.

“I wouldn’t say the door has ever closed,” Lo Castro said. “But the bottom line is, you still would need a facility. I think the door is less wide than it was wide in 2016. There are citizens here who may not want to attract it. People complain all the time about traffic. The door doesn’t stay open indefinitely. And the thing that attracts is having the facility already or the potential to build the facility. That sports complex went full speed ahead with minimal to no handshakes or possibilities on the table. “That was the spot where the plan should have been to attract something. But the plan was never in place, only the idea was. This isn’t Field of Dreams. The spring training teams aren’t walking out of the corn fields to our $120 million facility. I can’t get in a time machine and undo bad decisions. Now as a commissioner, it’s my job to make it successful.”