TL;DR – Atlanta Braves fail to secure new Spring Training home for 2018 and beyond; are now banking on good faith that Disney will allow them one-year extension
As if the Braves couldn’t swindle enough people in Georgia already, apparently they’ve been trying to find a way to swindle people in Florida too. The Braves’ agreement with the Walt Disney ESPN Wide World of Sports as official home to Atlanta Braves Spring Training home expires after the 2017 season. And with the vast majority of the teams in the Spring Grapefruit League all having moved to areas where they’re all close to each other, the Braves would like to become one of the cool kids, and relocate to where they can be close to other teams, and not spend so much of their Spring Training time on buses or driving long distances in order to play their scrimmages, from Orlando.
Naturally, the Braves want to build a brand new facility, or rather, have a brand new facility built for them at the expense of local taxpayers, in preferably places like Palm Beach, or Sarasota, where large clusters of teams call home come Spring Training. Hilariously, alleged talks with these regions have not progressed nearly as quickly enough for the Braves to be able to actually project where they will be training come the 2018 season.
And I hope it remains this way, and that the Braves don’t actually get another fucking sports facility built for them, because fuck more new sporting complexes.