ORLANDO, Fla. – The Orlando Dreamers made their pitch Wednesday for nearly $1 billion to be dedicated to the construction of a new baseball stadium, despite the fact that the Dreamers do not yet have a team to field.
“The last piece of the puzzle is for Orange County government to step up to the plate,” Dreamers’ co-founder Jim Schnorf said after presenting before Orange County stakeholders Wednesday.
Alongside World Series Most Valuable Player and Dreamers’ advisor David Eckstein, Schnorf spoke in front of the Orange County Tourist Development Tax Citizen Advisory Task Force, asking for $975 million for a stadium.
“Major League Baseball does not want to put a team if there’s not a public partner in that metro area,” Schnorf told the body, which is responsible for recommending how tax revenue generated from tourism is spent in the county.
Schnorf explained that Orlando is one of more than ten cities vying for an expansion slot. Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred has indicated that he would like to add two additional teams -- one on the west coast and one on the east coast -- before he retires in 2029.
“We would suggest that there wouldn’t be another applicant that would remotely approach the return on investment that Orange County gets from committing money towards our stadium project,” Schnorf told reporters.
Schnorf said that the Dreamers have already secured more than $2 billion in private capital for the construction of a stadium and team acquisition.
In the presentation to the task force, he said that an economic study projected the stadium project would create more than 38,000 construction jobs and more than 52,000 permanent jobs.
He said the study projects the economic impact over 30 years to be more than $72 billion.
But given that Schnorf was making a nearly billion dollar request, he was not surprised to be met with pushback.
“I just don’t see how this is viable in a reasonable timeframe,” Tina Demostene, a member of the TDT task force, said during the question and answer portion of the presentaton.
After the meeting, News 6’s Mike Valente pressed Schnorf about the notion that this request may be premature.
VALENTE: “What would you say to people who are sitting at home watching this and saying, ‘Well you’re asking for nearly a billion dollars in TDT funds, but you don’t even have a team secured yet?’ So it almost seems like this $975 million may not come to fruition.”
SCHNORF: “That’s the great opportunity for Orange County because there’s no risk to the county if for some reason we wouldn’t get a team. Now, we wouldn’t have gone through this exercise—-I’ve spent a considerable sum of money myself, thousands of hours on this, as have my partners—if we weren’t absolutely confident that we were gonna get a team.”
Schnorf told the task force that it could be two years before Major League Baseball decides on which markets will get expansion teams.