Cubs’ spring return a ‘second Christmas’ for Mesa economy
The Chicago Cubs will start their tenth spring training season at Mesa’s Sloan Park on Feb. 23 and the MLB franchise plans to continue its presence in the East Valley city for another decade.
The team first played a spring training game in 1952, launching a decadeslong partnership with Mesa. In the midaughts, the future of the Cubs in Mesa was uncertain, leading the city to invest millions of dollars to keep the team.
Since then, Cubs spring training games have been the highest-attended games nearly every year. Last season the team averaged 13,770 attendees per game followed by the Arizona Diamondbacks.
In 2023, a study with the Seidman Research Institute at Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business found that the season generated $710.2 million in total economic activity.
Mesa is also the only city in the Cactus League with two stadiums. Sloan Park is the largest spring training facility in Major League Baseball.
Justin Piper, general manager of Spring Training operations of the park, said the organization is very happy with the Mesa facility and that the Cubs have made several investments and improvements to the park since 2014.
The 10-year anniversary is an “important milestone” for the team, he said.
Cubs pitchers and catchers report to practice Wednesday with the full squad practice on Monday. The Cubs will face off against their archrivals the White Sox in the first game of the season on Feb. 23 and they’ll end the season against their other rivals the St. Louis Cardinals.
The Cardinals will make a rare Cactus League appearance in a two-game series on Monday, March 25 and Tuesday, March 26 at Sloan Park.
Why the Cubs almost left Arizona and how Mesa kept them
The Cubs made Mesa its Spring training home in the 1950s at
Rendezvous Park, which was later replaced with Hohokam Park. That park in turn was demolished and reconstructed in 1997 as a stadium with a more than 12,000 seat capacity.
Even with that capacity, the team was outgrowing its stadium, City Manager Chris Brady told The Arizona Republic.
In 2009, the team began throwing hints it would move to the Grapefruit League in Florida after a new owner took over the Cubs, but Mesa was set on keeping them in the Cactus League.
“We felt like for many years, for generations the Cubs have been identified as being a part of Mesa,” Brady said.
That prompted the city to put together a plan to keep the Cubs in Mesa. That included building a new stadium with a bigger capacity.
To do that, the city needed voter approval. Mesa residents overwhelmingly approved the measure, with 64% voting yes.
Mesa sold more than 11,000 acres of Pinal County farmland the city purchased in the 1980s for its water rights for $135 million. Those funds paid for the construction of Sloan Park and renovations of Hohokam Stadium.
Mesa spent about $99 million on Sloan Park and another $17.5 million on Hohokam Stadium.
Since the ballpark along Center Street was vacated, a year later the Oakland A’s moved from Phoenix to Mesa.
A spur of development
Brady said the baseball team is part of the city’s brand and has helped attract economic development.
From a sales tax perspective, Brady described it as the city’s “second Christmas.”
The ballpark has been the catalyst of economic development in the area around Sloan Park, Brady said. Last year, the city council approved a fourstory apartment complex next to the stadium on six acres, marking the first multi-family housing development in the area.
TikTok concert put Sloan Park on the map
The Sloan Park name went national in December when the video social media platform TikTok hosted its first global music event.
TikTok in the Mix included headliners like Niall Horan, Cardi B, Peso Pluma among other big name artists. The event drew a sold-out crowd of 17,000 and 9.6 million viewers who watched the show live on the platform, according to data from Visit Mesa, a tourism marketing firm.
The music festival signaled that park organizers are looking at new programming outside of baseball-adjacent events.
Piper, the park’s general manager, said he learned a lot from that experience and gave them new ideas on how to make it a music venue. He said they continue to look for more events outside of baseball to host at Sloan Park.
“We want to see another 2 million people walk through the doors” over the next 10 years, Piper said.