Greetings from Baseball City!
As I have occasionally mentioned on this site, my family's usual summertime practice had been to spend time renting a bungalow in a bungalow colony in upstate New York. This routine was paused in 2020, when the place we usually rented at had no plans to enforce social distancing practices, a matter we took very seriously at the time. To compensate, we decided to rent a house with a game room, swimming pool and TVs in every bedroom in Davenport, Florida (near Orlando) for the month of August. If we had to quarantine, then we were at least going to do it somewhere more fun than home. Little did I know at the time that I was living just a stone's throw from Kansas City Royals history.
Fast-forward four summers, and here we are again at a rental house in Davenport. This time, though, the circumstances were slightly different, and an errand had me drive south on US-27 from where we were staying. Five minutes into the drive, I pass this sign:
Was there some baseball significance to this area? I soon had my answer, as just a short distance further, I realized that I was leaving Davenport and entering Haines City. That's a town I'd heard of before, over thirty years ago. In 1988, the Royals had moved their spring training site and their Florida State League minor league team from Fort Myers to an amusement park called Boardwalk and Baseball, to which Haines City was said to be the closest town. (I guess Davenport itself was much smaller then. Likely the many housing developments which I see around here are newer than that, and many are vacation homes owned by people whose official residence is elsewhere...hence their availability for rental.) The minor league team was called the Baseball City Royals, and clearly, I was now (and four years ago) staying just a stone's throw from where they once played!
The site had an interesting history. It had originally been owned by the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus, and was intended to serve as not only the winter headquarters for the circus, but also to house a circus museum, theme park, hotel (elephant-shaped!) and residential housing development. While the hotel and housing never came through, the circus, theme park and museum opened in 1974 as Circus World and managed to turn a profit after a few years. Unfortunately for the circus, Disney World opened up Epcot Center in 1982 and introduced multi-day park-hopper passes, which drew customers who had previously spent only one day at Disney away from other central Florida attractions. With competition from Sea World and Busch Gardens for tourists' remaining non-Disney time, Circus World faltered and had to auction off vintage circus memorabilia to stay in the black. Ultimately, the park was sold to the publishing house Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, who had an idea to draw tourists to the site - baseball.
Circus World was closed and rebuilt as Boardwalk and Baseball, keeping the amusement rides but adding a baseball stadium, a few baseball-themed games, an ESPN studio that hosted a sports trivia game shoe and a baseball museum with exhibits on loan from the Hall of Fame. They signed the Royals to be their tenant. Several future Royals (or other teams') stars made stops in Baseball City on their way to the big leagues, including Kevin Appier, Brian McRae, Jeff Conine, Johnny Damon and Joe Randa, but the team drew neither a significant number of park-visiting tourists nor locals (such as there were). The team was so little-known that in 1989, when author David Lamb visited Baseball City during his "Stolen Season" (a book I highly recommend), he found the stadium rented out to a Christian revival group, few of whom knew anything about baseball belonging in the place (the team's schedule was to play the day following the revival). To summarize, as a tourist attraction, Boardwalk and Baseball was a flop.
In 1990, the publishing house sold the park to the Anheuser-Busch corporation, which had its own theme park down the road in Tampa. They closed the park and left the stadium to play out the contract with the Royals. In 1993, the Royals moved their High-A team to Wilmington in the Carolina League, and the Florida State League franchise of Baseball City was moved to Daytona Beach, where it became a Cubs affiliate. The Royals, however, still used the site for Spring Training until 2002, after which they moved their training camp to Surprise, Arizona, where it remains today.
The stadium sat abandoned for several years until it and the amusement park were demolished to make way for a retail mall called Posner Park (named after the developer who bought the property). On my way back from my errand, I drove down the street I has seen to see if any trace of a baseball field remains, but if there is any, it isn't obviously visible from the road. But there I was, sitting on a piece of Royals history. And the only trace of it that remains is a road designated as Home Run Boulevard.