Florida town welcomes Nationals

VIERA, Fla. — The Washington Nationals logo is everywhere at Space Coast Stadium. More than 1,500 tickets for the new club’s spring training games were purchased online within 20 minutes of going on sale.

ESPN will televise the Nationals’ first exhibition game on March 2 against the New York Mets. Ads for the Nationals’ spring training games appear in the newspaper Florida Today.

There is a new show in town for Major League Baseball’s spring training, one that local officials expect to be much bigger than those of the past.

Pitchers and catchers report today for spring training, more than four months after the Montreal Expos were relocated to the District in September. They later were rechristened the Nationals.

“We are very excited about having the Nationals here,” said Rob Varley, director of the Space Coast Tourism Council. “It will be such a better market for us than the Montreal Expos were. We think people from Washington will be coming down here to support their team and enjoy the area. We expect good things.”

But not quite everyone has gotten the message.

At a hotel in nearby Melbourne, the visitors’ channel broadcast a promotion for Florida Marlins games at Space Coast Stadium.

The channel is only two teams behind the times. The Marlins last trained at Space Coast Stadium in 2001, before the Expos arrived for the next three seasons.

The Nationals are the only major league team that trains in or near Viera. Seventeen other teams train in Florida, most of them around Tampa on the western coast or far south of Viera on the eastern coast. Twelve teams train in Arizona.

Viera, with a population of about 22,000, sits along Interstate 95 in Brevard County about 15 miles west of the Atlantic Ocean and 35 miles east of Orlando. Viera is not an incorporated municipality, although the mailing address for Space Coast Stadium is Viera. It is a planned community in a state full of planned communities, places with names such as “Celebration” and “Harmony.”

The community is the creation of the Duda family, one of the biggest producers and shippers of fruits and vegetables in the world.

The Dudas started Viera — the name means “faith” in the family’s native Slovak language — in 1989. The closest actual, well-known municipalities are Melbourne, Titusville, Cocoa and Cocoa Beach.

This is Central Florida — in an area also known as the “Space Coast” in reference to the nearby Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral.

The setting will be a big change for Washington-area fans used to spring training with the Baltimore Orioles in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Brevard County is the South, not South Florida. It sits about halfway between Miami and Jacksonville, but it is much closer to Jacksonville in personality.

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