MINOR LEAGUE BASEBALL: Fire Frogs will play in North Port

NORTH PORT

With all the negative news coming out in baseball lately, some positive news came out for the Atlanta Braves and the city of North Port.

Major League Baseball approved CoolToday Stadium, spring training home of the Braves, in North Port as the 2020 home for the Florida State League’s Florida Fire Frogs, according to Baseball America.

The move is only for the 2020 season.

The Fire Frogs have been homeless since the end of last season when team owners had worked out an agreement to get out of their lease with their old home at Osceola County Stadium in Kissimmee, where they had spent the past three seasons. Since the end of the FSL season, Osceola County Stadium has been converted into a soccer stadium.

That left the Fire Frogs without a place to play.

Last year, the Braves played one spring training game at CoolToday Stadium after finishing their lease at Wide World of Sports Complex in Lake Buena Vista in Disney World.

This year, Atlanta will move its entire spring operations to the state-of-the-art stadium in the West Villages section of North Port.

The arrival of the Fire Frogs certainly impinges on the territory of the Charlotte Stone Crabs in Port Charlotte. The move, however, was listed as a necessary temporary measure.

“Yes,” said Stone Crabs general manager Jeff Cook when asked if he thought this was a possibility. “Big picture for the Florida State League, something had to be done soon. For our part of it as an organization, we agreed to an exemption of our territory rights for just the 2020 season. Beyond that there is no agreement or guarantee or anything that the team would still be playing in North Port.”

The Stone Crabs, the Advanced Class A affiliate of the Tampa Bay Rays in the Florida State League, averaged 1,363 fans during 67 dates last year. The stadiums are separated by less than 14 miles.

“We’ll see,” Cook said. “It’s on the other end of town kind of. It’s on the other side from where we pull people from. So we’ll see.”

Interest in the Braves moving their spring training operations to North Port should spark the Fire Frogs attendance from a year ago. Last year in Kissimmee, the Fire Frogs attracted a total of 19,615 fans for 60 openings, an average of 327. It was not the lowest attendance in the Florida State League, though. Only the Dunedin Blue Jays’ average attendance of 203 was lower.

Currently, the move is for only one season.

The Fire Frogs were on the list of the 42 minor league teams Major League Baseball wants to eliminate in its realignment plan, according to the New York Times. So the team’s future still is pending.

The Fire Frogs finished 54-82 in 2019, last in the FSL North Division.

But for at least the 2020 season, the Florida Fire Frogs will have a home and North Port will have a Florida State League team at CoolToday Park for the summer.