Spring training plan stays alive

Steve Guiremand

Monday, June 26, 2000 | 10:08 a.m.

Don Logan hopes there is something to the old axiom that no news is good news.

Almost two weeks after the Los Angeles Dodgers' self-imposed June 14 deadline to determine their spring training future -- and the future of Logan's plans of turning Las Vegas into a third spring training mecca -- the Dodgers have yet to officially announce whether they will continue to train in Vero Beach, Fla., or move their spring operations to Las Vegas.

The Dodgers hold the key to Logan's spring training dreams. If they decide to return to a refurbished Dodgertown, where the team has trained since 1948, Las Vegas can probably kiss spring training goodbye.

Logan, the president and general manager of the triple-A Las Vegas Stars who is spearheading the spring training project for Las Vegas, believes the Dodgers' deadline was always a soft deadline and that a final decision likely won't be determined until around the July 10-12 All-Star break.

"The All-Star date is such a significant date in baseball," Logan said. "I still feel it probably won't happen much before then."

One reason for the delay is that Sam Fernandez, the Dodgers' general counsel who is overseeing the spring training issue for the club, has been tied up for the last two weeks with organizing suspension appeals for the Dodgers' recent donnybrook with fans at Wrigley Field.

Those appeals were heard last Tuesday and Wednesday in Houston.

Fernandez and Dodger officials met with officials from Vero Beach and Indian River County two weeks ago and presented a series of demands to keep the team there for spring training. Those demands included immediate improvements to the Dodgertown baseball facilities as well as a proposal for the county to buy a portion of Dodgertown from the club this year, and the rest of the facility within two years.

Logan said the Dodgers along with seven other teams -- Texas, Houston, Tampa Bay, Toronto, Baltimore and late entrants Kansas City and Cleveland -- have been presented a proposal that would involve the building of two three-team spring training complexes, each containing a stadium and at least six other fields, in the Las Vegas area. He said he has the financial backing of several city and county leaders to finance the projects once the Dodgers and at least five other teams give them the OK.

"We've given them a proposal that we'd give them X amount of dollars, the facilities and the stadiums," Logan said. "But the holdup now is how those teams would split the revenues. We've taken the position that it's not for us to determine that. It's up to those teams to figure out how they should do that."

Logan would not identify the county and city officials involved.

"We've talked specifically about property and stadium concepts and facility concepts," he said. "But we don't want to go any further than that until we get a commitment. We're not going to build anything until we have an agreement in place."

And that may not be for a couple of more weeks ... if at all.

"We obviously wouldn't have gone this far if we didn't feel good about our proposal," Logan said.