Bridget Binsbacher
Biography
Bridget Binsbacher is the executive director of the Cactus League. She has worked in the Cactus League for more than a decade and became its first female executive board member in 2012. She is also a Peoria, Arizona, city council member and the city’s vice mayor. Binsbacher has worked extensively in the financial industry with positions in operations management, sales management and business development. She is active with charitable organizations including the Alzheimer’s Association and the Peoria Chamber of Commerce. Her husband, Jon, is a fire captain and paramedic in the Northwest Valley of Arizona. They live in Peoria and have four children.
Interview
Interviewed by Fred Baldasarro (Master of Tourism Administration) and Vicente Pina (MBA) on March 25, 2020
When you hear the news, initially you think “Oh my gosh, this can’t be happening.” I have been going to spring training games for many years. I live in the city of Peoria. I remember the Peoria Sports Complex was way back in 1994. I remember looking forward to Major League Baseball opening spring training there with the first two-team facility in spring training history — and I’m not talking about in the Cactus League, but in spring training history. It has become a regular part of my life and my family’s life, long before I ever got into it professionally.
What we were looking for at the time of the announcement that spring training was cancelled, was some direction from Major League Baseball and what they were going to do, and looking closely at our local team, the Arizona Diamondbacks, and what they were going to do. I think the overall message, without a doubt, as a league, is that we are all in this together. And that has been pretty much how it has stayed. There are varying models and structures from facility to facility, but overall, we’re working closely together, and the message is that we are in this together.
We are trying to be a conduit for the Cactus League going forward. We started Cactus League conference calls during the first week in March. We only had a few of our members on that initial call. And let me be clear: The Cactus League Association’s membership is made up of all our stadium and facility operators, our facility owners, and our facility tenants, which varies from facility to facility. It can be the teams, the municipalities that house the fields, it’s the [Native American] tribes* that support teams. Every model is a little bit different.
At the time of the second conference call, which was in mid-March, we were notified by Major League Baseball that the spring training season was being cancelled. This call was to say, “Ok, here is where we are, how is everyone doing?” We have another one scheduled for today, March 25. The Cactus League Association is going to be putting out a notice weekly as a place for our members to go to share information, contribute updates and take a temperature check on the current situation.
We will know when or if it is time to come back from Major League Baseball. We’ll receive notification via email before anything else happens. The Cactus League oversees spring training, but our 10 facilities and our 15 spring training teams all have different relationships with their respective parent teams. Some of them might get information before I do so we’re working very closely together and staying closely connected as a league to make sure that we’re all on the same page. It’s definitely difficult though to get everyone on the same page as far as receiving that information and responding to that information.
It is hard to calculate the economic impact at this point. We’re in a situation in which we are just in a holding pattern, wait and see. There is an economic impact to this situation for sure. Though we got through 19 games of 33 in our spring training season [about 60 percent of the season], we know that our numbers were right on target to meet last year’s numbers, and last year we had 1.7 million fans come to spring training. Our last economic impact study was in 2018, and we were in the middle of doing our 2020 economic impact study when spring training was cancelled.
We don’t know what the future impact is yet because Major League Baseball not only cancelled spring training, but also suspended the regular season. There is still a possibility that some things are going to happen in 2020, depending on how all of this unfolds. We’ll have to consider everything and then put that together with what we already have to determine what the outcome of 2020 looks like.
We understand that many fans look forward to Cactus League games and we sympathize with those whose plans were impacted. We are all in this together.
*Native American tribes in Arizona have been involved in the Cactus League in a variety of ways. For example, two of the local tribes in Arizona were involved in attracting two MLB teams from Tucson to reservation land in Scottsdale to build a new baseball stadium named Salt River Fields at Talking Stick. The name pays homage to the heritage of the Pima and Maricopa tribes.