SALT RIVER PIMA-MARICOPA INDIAN COMMUNITY, Ariz. — Goodbye, Tucson.
Hello, upscale casino (860 slots and 50 gaming tables), luxurious resort hotel (500 rooms and suites), spa, convention center and golf club, five restaurants, entertainment district, sports bar and shopping mall, and a Wal-Mart.
And — oh, I almost forgot — the Rockies’ future $100 million spring baseball home.
It’s a site for soaring eyes.
The Rockies’ new ballpark in 2011 will be historic. The elderly stadium will be history in 13 days.
Hi Corbett Field in Tucson was built in 1937 for the Lizards, a minor-league team. The bold, contemporary new stadium 120 miles from Tucson and just east of Scottsdale will be completed before next year’s spring training and shared by the Rockies and the Diamondbacks.
Welcome to the big leagues, Rox.
Finally, in the club’s 19th season, the Rockies will upgrade from steerage to first class.
The Rockies and their camp-followers from Colorado will love the Pima-Maricopa Nation.
The Rox and the D-backs will have 12 practice fields, spacious clubhouses, office and training facilities and team merchandise stores.
This ancient tribal land is being transformed into the first major-league spring training ballpark on a Native American reservation.
For those who think Denver and Phoenix-based clubs will become cats and dogs living together, realize that the Pima and Maricopa tribes originally weren’t so fond of each other, either, but banded together for protection from the Apaches.
In 1879 President Rutherford B. Hayes signed an executive decree giving (back to) the Pima-Maricopa people 52,600 acres on the banks of the Salt River. Today the community of 8,700 is surrounded by Scottsdale, Mesa, Tempe and Fountain Hills.
Nineteen-thousand acres are held as a natural preserve, and a border section of 140 acres is composed of an underutilized public golf course, sagebrush and cacti — with roadrunners and prairie dogs scampering about — is being transformed into the latest and greatest spring training complex in Arizona or Florida. Ground was broken in November.
A visitor to the field of Rox dreams a couple of days ago had to be half-visionary, half-gila monster.
Home plate hasn’t been set in dirt yet.
The complex — with 7,000 permanent seats (and room for 4,000 more spectators on the berm beyond the outfield walls) at the centerpiece stadium — is 15 minutes from the Phoenix airport, alongside Loop 101 Freeway and a half-mile north of Indian Bend Road, and about 30 seconds from Casino Arizona. Currently the community-run gambling operation is squeezed into a pair of temporary tents, but a Las Vegas- style paradise will open April 17 and include the 15-story Talking Stick Resort, Spa & Golf Course, showrooms, restaurants, bars, a convention center and, of course, an all-you-can-eat buffet.
The stadium will incorporate a Native American theme and have a roof shading 85 percent of the seats, wide concourses, more restrooms, video scoreboards, luxury boxes and spectacular views of the Red, Camelback, Superstition and McDowell mountains.
Until recently, farming dominated this natural desert setting, right out of an Arizona Highways magazine pictorial. The Pima-Maricopas grow cotton, broccoli, potatoes, onions, melons and carrots. But, alas and at last, the valuable land has become more fertile for economic development.
Why baseball?
The Pima-Maricopa Indian Community was as affected as every other community in the country by the recession, and tribal leaders searched for more revenue streams. Ironically, $20 million of the funds for the stadium were obtained in a grant from the federal government’s stimulus package.
The other $80 mil will come from casino revenues, facilities’ rent from the Rockies and the Diamondbacks (who have signed 25-year agreements to train here), sales taxes at the new businesses and corporations that have signed on. Stone Cold Creamery moved its headquarters here; Wal-Mart built a store, and other major companies are following.
Pima and Maricopa officials undertook an ambitious, expensive project, and the Rox and the D-backs are the major (league) attraction.
Both franchises will end their spring training attachment to Tucson in a couple of weeks. Next year they’ll join 13 other teams playing in spokes around the Phoenix wheel.
Actually, the Rox and the D-backs got it right. They couldn’t be in a better place. Instead of regular, monotonous, 5- to 8-hour round-trip bus rides on Interstate 10, the Rockies can streak to other stadiums in 10 to 45 minutes. And the edge of Scottsdale beats Surprise, Goodyear and Peoria.
The Diamondbacks players can stay in their own homes, and Phoenix is easier to get to (and cheaper) for Coloradans. Spring training attendance for Rockies’ spring games in Tucson has been unimpressive for 18 years, and crowds dwindled even as the Rockies became a World Series participant. The numbers were down 6 percent in 2009 and have dropped another 740 per exhibition to 4,122 this year. (In comparison, the Mariners, in Peoria, had a SRO 11,000 for the Rockies game Thursday.) The Rockies’ largest gathering (5,699) was due to the presence of the Cubs.
Tucson never felt like home for the Rockies or a place to visit for Coloradans. And Tucson never really adopted the Rockies. Hi Corbett Field isn’t a blast from baseball’s past; it has the feel, appearance and cramped quarters of a high school football stadium.
Shortly after the club’s birth, I begged the Rockies not to make the mistake of training in Tucson, abandoned by the Indians and too distant from other Cactus League teams. But the franchise’s ownership went cheap, accepted a sweetheart deal and personal perks, and cost itself dearly in the long run.
Players, managers, umpires, media and fans from Colorado grumbled annually about Tucson.
Tucson didn’t endear itself to the Rockies, but the Rockies did endure — and, truthfully, enjoy — Tucson.
The Rox final exhibition in Tucson against the Cubs will be played on April Fool’s Day. How appropriate.
It’s the end of an error.
So long, old friend.
Hellooooooo, Salt River Pima-Maricopa Nation.
Woody Paige: 303-954-1095 or wpaige@denverpost.com
