Brisbane 2032 leaves door open to as-yet unfunded baseball stadium

Brisbane 2032 organisers have left the door open to a proposed ballpark in Logan to host baseball and softball during the Olympic and Paralympic Games, despite no guarantee it will be built.

A pre-feasibility report into what would be a privately built stadium went before Logan City Council on Wednesday morning, but city planning, economic and community development general manager David Radich told councillors no private funding had been secured.

“There are people that are generally interested [in investing], but there are no people that have committed to funding the stadium,” he said.

“That process is still live with Griffith University as the landowner.”

Interest to build the privately funded 4000-seat stadium, which could be expanded to 10,000 for the Olympics, had come from both Australia and overseas, Radich said, but he would not reveal from whom.

The pre-feasibility report noted the $156 million facility would be a harder sell for potential investors if baseball and softball were not included in the 2032 Olympic Games.

Asked whether the proposed ballpark was part of Brisbane 2032’s thinking when it came to deliberations about the Games’ sports roster, organising committee president Andrew Liveris remained open to the idea.

“We are in the process of assessing a range of sports and venues ahead of our sports program being confirmed and Venue Master Plan being progressed,” he said.

“Until such point in time that sports and venues are confirmed, we’re not ruling anything in or out.”

The proposal was largely met with positivity from Logan councillors on Wednesday morning.

Division 2 councillor Teresa Lane said the council should embrace the idea and “dream about something different”.

“When I go overseas and I go to countries and I see whack-a-doodle ideas come to fruition, I enjoy the living daylights out of them – things like Ba Na Hills in Vietnam and Ski Dubai,” she said.

“I always think it’s not actually for the residents that live there, but there are income-generating possibilities.”

Mayor Jon Raven, who has championed the ballpark for more than a year, said it was “always a little bit of a niche concept” to pursue, but he suspected the community would get behind high-level baseball if it were on offer.

“The community is interested in sport and if it’s a low-cost activity that’s easy to get to, they’ll do it locally,” he said.

“They’re not going to go all the way into Brisbane or the Gold Coast for something like that, but if it’s available locally, I think they’ll get involved.”

Raven said if the ballpark did not “stack up” for investors, it would not stack up for ratepayers.

“[We’ve been] able to access the big investors overseas in the US, in Taiwan, in Japan, who are absolutely mad about baseball and would just flex on the fact that they’ve got an Olympic-standard baseball diamond built and constructed in Logan,” he said.

“If nothing else, [this process] has turned the eyes of many investors to Logan where they had never been before, and it’s opened Griffith’s eyes to the fact that there is a lot of interest in their campus.”

Queensland Sport and Olympics Minister Tim Mander played down the Logan stadium on Tuesday, saying an alternative site, which was yet to be made public, had been identified for diamond sports should they be included for 2032.

But Raven said cynics should “watch this space”.

“We’re still hustling as hard as we can to try and find an investor, whether they’re local or overseas, and hopefully we’ll be able to land a couple of extra stadiums for Logan before the Olympics,” he said.

Baseball Australia chief executive Glenn Williams, along with Softball Australia, has been involved in a years-long campaign for 2032 inclusion.

“We’ve been well aware of what Logan would like to do for the proposed facility and we’ve shared ideas and plans around it,” he said.

“Anyone who’s interested in putting in an international baseball [and] softball facility is someone we’re supportive of.”

Williams said Olympic inclusion would be a huge boost to his sport’s participation rates.

“There are some sports that take [Olympic status] for granted at times,” he said.

“For us, who’ve been on the Olympic calendar and off the Olympic calendar again, we realise the importance of actually being on that runway and having a team competing in the 2032 Games.”

Baseball is popular in East Asia, making it an attractive product for Olympic broadcasters in markets such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines, in addition to traditional markets in the Americas.

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