Diamond in the Rough : One Man’s Field of Dreams Has Best of Everything--Except Team

It rises from the flat, fertile farmland like a pink mirage, a double-decked colossus sprouting from the soil where corn and tomatoes once grew. But this is no dream, and when you pass through the vaulted arches you won’t find just a baseball field.

No, here on the outskirts of this small south Florida agricultural community is a new $20-million stadium complex featuring a major-league diamond with flagpoles down the 332-foot foul lines, and locker rooms, a press box, two elevators and 6,500 blue-green plastic seats, extra wide and bolted in.

“Just look at this,” says Alex Muxo Jr., the Homestead city manager. He was standing above the box seats, behind where home plate will be, sweeping his arm through the warm air. “There is no other spring-training facility in the country that compares with this.

“Sky boxes. A 2,200-square-foot stadium club. Television wiring. Batting cages. Five practice fields. Laundry facilities. Clubhouse with whirlpools, weight rooms and 60 players’ lockers, with extra room for catchers to store their equipment. We’ve thought of everything.”

Indeed, the Homestead Sports Complex does seem to have everything.

Except a team.

With the 26 major-league baseball teams breaking their camps in Arizona and Florida, what may be the world’s finest spring-training facility stands empty.

“Don’t be a pessimist,” Muxo chides visitors who asked whether that’s a problem. “We weren’t quite ready this year. And besides, wasn’t it Yogi Berra who said, ‘If you don’t take the risk, you won’t steal third base’?”

Muxo, a 35-year-old native of Cuba, didn’t just see the popular 1989 movie “Field of Dreams.” He rewrote it. In the movie, the character played by Kevin Costner carves a baseball diamond out of a cornfield after hearing a voice say, “If you build it, he will come.”

In Muxo’s version, the voice said, “If you build a state-of-the-art baseball complex, with 14 luxury sky boxes you can lease for $60,000 each (for 10 years), a major-league team will come.”

Other cities have been on similar paths. Denver and Charlotte both recently launched baseball stadium financing and design efforts with no commitment that big-league clubs would move in.

Muxo is more modest. He only wants the team for spring training. And he has already leased 13 of the sky boxes. But the team hasn’t shown up yet.

Not that there haven’t been lookers. Among those who have recently traveled 35 miles south of Miami to take the tour are officials from the California Angels and the Boston Red Sox.

Kevin Ulich, director of stadium operations for the Angels, describes the Homestead complex as “gorgeous, by far better than any facility in the Cactus League. It’s first-class all the way.”

For the Angels, who go through spring training in Mesa, Ariz., and play their home exhibition games in Palm Springs, Homestead looks inviting. The club is also being courted by Tempe, Ariz., and Tucson, as well as by Melbourne, Fla.

Ulich says the club “is definitely leaving Palm Springs, and I’d say it’s 50-50” the Angels end up in south Florida. “If we move by next spring,” he says, “Homestead is the only place we could go.”

But the Homestead drawback is location. As a major-league training site, Homestead is 65 miles from Ft. Lauderdale, where the New York Yankees are based, and more than 200 miles from central Florida, where most of the other 16 Grapefruit League teams spend March.

“It’s so far south of everything else,” Ulich says. “But to have that facility sitting there without a commitment is ridiculous.”

Muxo’s answer to the problem of distance is an airplane. The city has a contract to lease a 50-seat turbo-prop, which will be provided to the team at nominal cost.

“Sixty-one minutes to Orlando,” says Muxo. “Right now teams are making 2 1/2-hour bus rides from field to field.”

Almost as striking as Muxo’s brash optimism is the way he managed to get the stadium built.

Taking advantage of what he calls “a loophole in the law,” Muxo claimed some $12 million of the construction cost from a 3% hotel-bed tax collected by Dade County as a way to finance tourism-related capital improvements. That money had been earmarked for a trolley car system in Miami Beach, where about 40% of the county’s hotel rooms are located.

But when the Miami Beach City Commission turned down the trolley proposal, Muxo stepped forward with Homestead’s stadium plan. And although many Miami Beach residents were furious--only 2.54% of the county’s bed tax comes from Homestead--the city had no choice but to hand Homestead the money.

“He’s gung-ho, and he was smart enough to be there,” says former Miami Beach City Manager Rob Parkins of Muxo. “He clearly was next in line with a qualified project.”

Ironically, Parkins--who advised Muxo on submitting the stadium project for funding--last month became city manager of Palm Springs, the town the Angels are planning to leave.

“That is ironic,” Parkins agrees. “I would prefer the Angels not leave, but I don’t know what the circumstances are.”

Muxo and other Homestead officials have been scrambling for months to find a stadium tenant, and the official completion date is April 10. Recently the parking lot was being paved, the locker rooms were incomplete and trucks were rumbling over the infield, dumping sand for the foundation of a natural grass playing surface, which Muxo claims will drain a fierce subtropical rainstorm in seven minutes.

The first ballplayers to actually take the field here may be 80 or so amateurs who will try out in November for the 1992 U.S. Olympic team. Officials of the U.S. Baseball Federation agreed last month to hold the trials at the stadium. In a letter to Muxo, they said, “The ballpark is without question the best facility in America, and therefore in the world.”

For now, such compliments may be enough for the 32,000 residents of Homestead, a city on the eastern edge of the Everglades once best known as a seasonal home to thousands of migrant farm workers and the last stop for gas before the Florida Keys.

But if the Homestead Sports Complex is vacant this time next year, Muxo’s field of dreams could turn into his nightmare. He says he’s not concerned.

“In my mind, there is no question we’ll get a team,” he says.

Besides courting existing teams, Muxo also is talking with H. Wayne Huizenga, Blockbuster Entertainment chairman, about providing the spring-training home for the National League team that the video store mogul is hoping to land for Miami. An announcement on that could be made as early as this month.

Recently a friend sent Muxo a movie poster from “Field of Dreams,” but it was still rolled up in a corner of his office, leaning next to a fishing rod.

“I am going to put it up, but I just haven’t had time yet,” he says. “I’ve been too busy getting this stadium built.”