From Seasonal Asset to Year-Round Engine

• An underutilized portfolio. 23 Spring Training venues occupy over 100 acres of land in the fastest-growing cities in the country, yet most operate at peak capacity for just six weeks out of the year.
• Spring Training venues have unique geographic clustering. Unlike most national sports organizations, MLB Spring Training venues are clustered tightly around the Phoenix metropolitan area and the southwest coast of Florida along the Tampa – Fort Myers corridor.
• Franchise brand recognition is the baseline driver of attendance, but venue quality, location context, and capacity determine the level of activity generated outside of the core season.
• Prioritizing urban integration and retrofitting for greater versatility while establishing the next wave of location and design strategies will accelerate growth and drive spillover benefits for existing entertainment and hospitality nodes.

In late February, professional baseball begins its gradual return from the offseason, and teams assemble in Florida and Arizona to begin a month-long Spring Training, where 30 MLB franchises participate in roughly 30 games each to ramp up for the regular season. Over the past 100 years, Spring Training has evolved from an informal training process some franchises took on to gain an edge, to an institutional product, generating millions of ticket sales per year and giving rise to 23 dedicated ballparks specifically developed for Spring Training. Fans from around the country coincide spring vacations with Spring Training hotspots, and some retirees even specifically relocate to Spring Training clusters to tap into the appeal of a low-cost, low-stakes and more intimate setting where they can watch and interact with players on their favorite teams.

As Spring Training continues to commercialize, the confluence of fan experience improvements and extremely strong demographic momentum in Arizona and Florida has led to increasing attendance rates, and greater general activation of venues throughout the year. Core attendance for Spring Training reached 3.3 million in 2025, the highest level since 2019, and total annual attendance across ballparks exceeded 5 million for the first time ever, totalling 5.7 million visitors in 2025.

^{Source: JLL Research, Major League Baseball, Placer.ai}

MLB’s Spring Training is a unique product among professional sports. While other leagues all generally include some sort of pre-season training or competitions, MLB’s pre-season is uniquely positioned as a consumer-facing product, and the only one with unique dedicated venues that are intended to serve a large spectator audience. This enables non-baseball monetization, creates at least the potential for continuous activation, and supports mixed-use spillover to other properties, though true Lifestyle environments have only emerged in a few cases. While progressive institutionalization has created a commercialized product, these ballparks are still unique in having extreme geographic proximity, and a very short period of seasonal activation.

^{Source: JLL Research}

Spring Training is organized into two sub-leagues, the Cactus League, with ten venues clustered tightly around the Phoenix metro, and the Grapefruit League in Florida, with 13 ballparks distributed among six metro areas but largely concentrated around the southwest coastal corridor from Tampa to Fort Myers. The clustering of locations is intentional, to avoid cumbersome travel schedules for players, but it does create saturation risks: over 200 games are played in each league over the course of six weeks, a very high ratio of events per capita in the context of local populations.

The geographic clustering is analogous to seasonal utilization patterns: Spring Training ballparks see a brief but intense surge of attendance during the Spring Training season, but many remain largely unutilized throughout the remainder of the year. More than 50% of annual attendance comes in a six-week period from late February through March.

^{Source: JLL Research, Placer.ai}

Concentrated activation is suboptimal for residents and municipalities, and to a lesser extent the franchises themselves. Host cities in Arizona and Florida, who in most cases own the ballparks, would benefit from increased revenue from additional events, higher tax revenue from the increase in commercial activity, and increased general appeal of the metro with elevated entertainment offerings. Residents themselves would benefit from having a greater diversity and abundance of entertainment offerings, as well as new and consistent destinations for social engagement. Increased amenity value and perceived vibrancy ultimately attract more residents to the area generally and can eventually support increased residential density in adjacent parcels. While franchises themselves may not directly profit from sustained utilization, downstream benefits for brand recognition, fan acquisition, and operational employee facilities would incentivize groups to support any ballpark enhancements. Increasing offseason utilization by just 10% of capacity would lead to roughly 2 million additional visits per year—it is estimated that fostering year-round activation at all venues would generate as much as 6 to 7 million additional visits across both leagues.

While Spring Training ballparks have a unique position within professional sports, transforming them into more vibrant year-round venues is far from a mystery: using existing attendance trends based on the diverse set of current ballparks that host Spring Training, we can ascertain what levers will have the most influence. Unsurprisingly, the single most important factor in determining Spring Training ticket sales is franchise popularity: the ten franchises with the largest fan bases generated more than 60% higher attendance in Spring Training than the ten least-popular MLB franchises. But beyond core attendance, and particularly as ancillary events and year-round activation are pulled into consideration, new factors become increasingly important.

Ballpark quality and location context are paramount in transforming Spring Training venues into year-round destinations, and this is already evident when looking at the spectrum of venues that exist today. A more vibrant location context and activated surroundings serve as the primary drivers of sustainable activation, with retrofitting and capacity serving as enabling mechanisms. Current venues were constructed from 1966-2019, and have capacities ranging from 5,500 to 15,000, so ballparks reflect many different eras of design, comprise a range of scales, and sit in a variety of urban and suburban contexts. Those more vibrant locations, from a walkability and retail concentration perspective, show considerable ability to drive attendance, when stadiums are retrofitted and capacity is not extraordinarily constrained. Peoria Stadium, part of the Peoria Sports Complex which houses the San Diego Padres and Seattle Mariners, is the most active year-round venue in all of Spring Training, largely due to these dynamics. The complex is embedded within the main shopping and entertainment district of Peoria, has a waterfront location, and in addition to two franchises’ Spring Training homes, the complex hosts youth sports tournaments, conventions, races, and the Vans Warped Tour music festival every summer since 2002. Neither capacity nor infrastructure are a limiting factor—the stadium can accommodate 12,000 guests, is serviced by public transit and has ample parking. This led to nearly 1 million visitors in 2025, more than triple Spring Training venues’ average of 295,000. By contrast, Camelback Ranch in Glendale (Spring Training home of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago White Sox) demonstrates the limits of facility quality and scale in the absence of Lifestyle integration. The ballpark opened in 2009, making it one of Spring Training’s newer venues, capacity is nearly identical to Peoria Stadium, and the Dodgers and White Sox represent two Tier 1 franchises from the second and third largest cities in the U.S. Despite these advantages, Camelback Ranch generates less than one-third the annual visitation of Peoria, limited by location context. While Peoria is surrounded by a shopping and entertainment district, Camelback Ranch is a relatively isolated venue in a car-centric environment. Within a half-mile radius, Peoria Stadium has over 250,000 s.f. of office, 800,000 s.f. of retail, over 550 residential units and nearly 400 hotel rooms—Camelback Ranch has none of these properties in a half-mile radius. The brief seasonal spike of activity at Camelback Ranch illustrates how facility modernization alone does not guarantee activation: it may enable new possibilities for event typology, but without underlying Lifestyle dynamics, any uplift may be limited.

^{Source: JLL Research}

^{Note: Lifestyle Location Rating reflects walkability, surrounding retail and hospitality density, urban integration and year-round activation potential.}

A strong relationship exists between year-round activation and locational context; in fact, it appears to be the single most influential factor in determining the level of offseason foot traffic a venue can generate. Most ballparks that fall outside of the predictable range have other factors influencing attendance: Scottsdale Stadium sits in a vibrant pocket of downtown Scottsdale, but only hosts one franchise for Spring Training and is one of the older venues, being constructed in 1992; CACTI Park has limited adjacent retail and hospitality, but hosts two franchises, was constructed in 2017, and has assembled high-end operations facilities around the park for additional experiential appeal; Camelback Ranch outperforms through franchise power, with a large pipeline of Dodgers fans from Los Angeles making the relatively short trip to attend games.

Where venue relocation is not feasible and current surroundings are isolated and car-centric, some supportive development around the venues can still be justified and improve the fan experience. Team offices, other practice facilities or supportive complexes, and small-scale retail can be successful and accretive to these emerging compact stadium districts even in challenging locations.

Cities that own or host Spring Training ballparks should anchor their strategic efforts in four different objectives: (1) retrofit ballparks for versatility, (2) activate the venue’s surroundings and optimize car infrastructure, (3) aim for integration or relocation to existing entertainment and hospitality nodes (4) and curate a robust and community-centric event calendar with non-seasonal programming. Retrofitting older ballparks ensures that venues are able to accommodate a diversity of events including games, tournaments, conventions and concerts. Scottsdale Stadium took efforts to accomplish this with an improvement project that completed in 2020, developing an adjacent events center and redeveloping plazas to support year-round programming. Activating surroundings makes the venue itself more appealing to visitors and increases dwell time; these projects can also be achieved within the scope of baseball operations facilities. Salt River Fields at Talking Stick exemplifies this approach, with parks, additional fields and training facilities assembled around the main stadium, creating experientially interesting surroundings. Integration with existing entertainment hotspots creates a self-reinforcing demand loop: shoppers, diners and residents looking for daytime entertainment are more likely to attend events at the venue, and event attendees are more likely to spend additional time and money visiting nearby retail and in some cases hotels. The city of Peoria implemented a master plan to develop a surrounding mixed-use district around the Peoria Sports Complex in 2010, explicitly aiming to create a dynamic, 24-hour district, and today the venue sees more year-round foot traffic than any other Spring Training facility. Finally, focusing on operations and organization to ensure robust offseason scheduling, centered around community-driven activities like tournaments, conventions, festivals, and smaller-scale concerts ensures consistent foot traffic and repeated reinforcement of consumer behavior, helping venues to become true local destinations that are anchored within residents’ routine activity patterns.

Isolated, car-dependent locations with limited surrounding density may realize only modest gains from activation strategies unless supported by complementary development. Public ROI and Lifestyle spillover demand may be weaker in markets where entertainment is already near saturation, or where demographics are relatively weaker. In short, not all Spring Training ballparks can achieve full Lifestyle integration. But Lifestyle-integrated venues are systematically outperforming isolated seasonal venues as a sustainable economic engine and continued adoption of these strategies will unlock value and drive vibrancy and appeal for host cities and residents alike.