SURPRISE

Surprise and Peoria improve spring training stadiums

David Madrid
The Republic | azcentral.com
  • The Cactus League is about competition, be it teams playing ball or cities spending to keep teams
  • That means building new stadiums or renovating existing stadiums to prevent teams from leaving
Workers pour concrete into forms for hydrotherapy pools as part of the renovation of the clubhouses at Surprise Stadium, home of the Kansas City Royals and the Texas Rangers, on August 21, 2015.

The Cactus League is all about competition, whether it's 15 teams playing baseball around the Valley in March, or spring training cities trying desperately to hold on to their teams.

Keeping teams happy often means building new stadiums or renovating existing ones to prevent teams from leaving.

In the West Valley, two cities are keenly aware of potential competition that can come from rival cities in the Valley or even from the Grapefruit League in Florida.

Surprise and Peoria have extended the number of years teams will play in those cities by upgrading their facilities.

Surprise is racing toward a Feb. 9 deadline to complete a $22 million renovation of the Texas Rangers and the Kansas City Royals clubhouses.

The Rangers are getting a bigger and better weight room, a new multipurpose room to hold meetings, and kitchen improvements. Both teams are getting hydrotherapy pools, new carpet and state-of-the-art digital and electronic capabilities.

The Royals are getting a kitchen, which they didn't have, a redesigned major league locker room and renovated major and minor league coaches’ locker rooms.

In Peoria, the San Diego Padres and Seattle Mariners renewed their 20-year lease through 2034 after an agreement to mostly demolish and rebuild the teams' clubhouses and install state-of-the-art training equipment. That, along with other stadium projects, will cost the city a little more than $45 million, said Ed Striffler, architectural services manager with Peoria's Development and Engineering Department.

Mark Coronado, Surprise Community and Recreation director and president of the Cactus League, said Surprise got a good deal on financing the project partly through an agreement with the teams to provide the city with  $480,000 a year for 14 years via ticket surcharges.

The teams are extending their contract dates to January 2030.

“We’re very lucky that the teams entered into a surcharge agreement," Coronado said.

Rob Matwick, Texas Rangers executive vice president of business operations, said striking the deal was necessary for the team.

“We needed (the upgrade) in order to stay competitive with the rest of the clubs in the Cactus League," Matwick said. "We’ve been in the facility for a number of years now, and it’s just like owning a home or running a ballpark. From time to time you have to look at doing a capital investment to do upgrades.”

Surprise built its Surprise Recreation Campus for about $48 million in 2002, with $42 million used for the design and construction of the complex, and $6 million to buy the land. The Arizona Sports and Tourism Authority covered about $32 million of the cost.

Spring training is only part of what the teams do at their Cactus League facilities, Matwick said. The Rangers have a year-round presence in Surprise.

“It’s not only a benefit for spring training, but we have our summer league there, our instructional league in the fall," he said. "We have a lot of players that will come to the Valley in January, after the holidays, to begin to work out to prepare for the season. So we truly do maintain a 12-month presence at the facility.”

The upgrades also will help improve athletes' strength training and conditioning.

"There was a time when spring training was used to get in shape. Now our players come in shape, and certainly, you want the facility to give you every opportunity to prepare for Day 1 of the opening day Major League season," said Jamie Reed, Texas Rangers director of medical operations. "There’s a lot of demand on the Arizona complexes, and the city of Surprise is bringing us up to a state-of-the-art and futuristic facility.”

As part of that future, there will be two new hydrotherapy pools on the major league side of the Rangers' clubhouse and three on the minor league side.

Each pool has its own purpose, from hot pools used to warm up the body and cold pools for recovery after games, workouts and for healing and therapy. The largest of the five Rangers pools has a treadmill built into the bottom that can reduce body weight enough to begin rehabilitation of injuries sooner than would be possible on dry land, Reed said.

"The bigger tanks ... allow more people to utilize them at the same time, and in spring training we have as many as 60 guys in major league spring training and as many as 175 guys at one time in minor league spring training," Reed said.

The Surprise Stadium was built 13 years ago, which makes it old by baseball standards, Reed said.

"Our weight room is going to be five times the size it was before," he said. "We're adding a second kitchen on the major league side because food and sports nutrition has become such a big part of baseball."

In Peoria, the upgrades also helped to secure another lease with spring training teams, Striffler said.

"This was part of the lease negotiations that we would significantly enhance their 20-year-old facilities, that were by Cactus League standards, grossly too small, old, and looked more like high school locker rooms than professional baseball facilities," Striffler said. "We couldn't offer them a high school locker room when Goodyear and Phoenix and Salt River Fields has a new standard of what these facilities look like."

The new buildings are about 60 percent bigger and energy efficient enough to be certified LEED gold, the second-highest energy efficiency rating, by the U.S. Green Building Council.

Each building has an expanded training room and hydrotherapy room with two hot tubs, two cold tubs and a resistance pool with built-in treadmill, much like Surprise Stadium.

The city also renovated the stadium, which included a new entrance, team store, second souvenir shop, reconstruction of the outfield berm and repainting.

This year, Peoria is adding new permanent seats on the third-base side of the stadium, a large social venue under the seats, and an area for kids.

In 1994, the teams signed 20-year leases with Peoria to play at the Peoria Sports Complex. The original cost of the sports complex was $32 million, paid for by Peoria and Maricopa County.