Less surprising than Grayson Allen tripping someone again despite saying he’s grown out of it, the Atlanta Braves’ spring training saga yet continues on, this time revealing that the team has signed an extension with the Disney Wide World of Sports for the 2019 season, with the writing between the lines meaning that the new facility in Sarasota, won’t be finished in time.
Who would’ve thunk it? That in spite of the $100M+ budget and all the promises and plans in the world, the magical construction of an entire facility in a calendar year seems to be viewed as potentially unrealistic.
In all fairness, the Braves do deserve a little bit of credit at identifying the potential for failure this early, and moving forward with a logical contingency plan. And as much as I bet Disney would have loved to have turned the screws to the Braves and told them that seat’s taken and that they would have to find somewhere else, the reality is that almost all of the teams in the Grapefruit League want to be in a coastal town, so Orlando is kind of screwed for Spring Training once the Braves depart. So clearer heads prevailed, and the Braves get one last partial Spring Training at Disney, and Disney gets to cash in on that sweet MLB money for one more spring.
But it’s still a failure in the sense that the Braves made all these grandiose plans and basically gave Disney their walking papers, but when their shit started to seep through the cracks, they kind of had to crawl back to the hand that’s been feeding them for the last few decades for their safety net.
As it stands now, the plans for 2019 are that the Braves will start Spring Training in Orlando at Disney, as has been the norm for the last 20+ years. But then the final game of Spring Training will be held at the new training grounds in Sarasota, as something of a consolation prize for everyone who may have already been making plans to go there instead of Orlando in 2019.
The reality of it is kind of messed up, because if there’s absolutely anything prissy baseball players whine about during Spring Training, it’s the necessity to travel back and forth throughout Florida to and from various facilities to other towns to play in their series of scrimmages throughout March. And in 2019, the Braves will uproot in the midst of their Spring Training, so they can move all their shit from Orlando further south into Sarasota, where they’ll have to settle in all over again to play one single game, and then Spring Training is over, and the team and personnel have to pack all their shit up yet again, so that it can be sent back to Atlanta, where for the second year in a row the Braves will have an exhibition game against the Yankees at ScumTrust Park.
I’m sure the players will love that. Sure, they barely have to do any labor other than travel, but most of them are bitches anyway and will not be happy about it regardless.
But since when did the Braves ever care about the happiness of anyone other than their investors and top dogs?
