On the afternoon of August 12, Mayor Tim Sanders, Bader Companies president Robb Bader, and a handful of other Blaine officials stood on a flat stretch of land near 105th Avenue and put shovels into dirt. Cameras caught the moment. A press release went out. By the next day, headlines across the state were reporting the same fact: Blaine was getting a professional baseball team for the first time since the St. Paul Saints left independent ball behind in 2020.
That's the version of the story that traveled. It's also the smaller half of it.
What $750 Million Actually Buys
The stadium is real. It will seat 5,000 people, with 3,034 fixed seats and a full turf field designed to host lacrosse matches and concerts as easily as baseball. It's the reason a team from the American Association of Professional Baseball, an MLB Partner League with 12 existing clubs stretching from Canada to Texas, agreed to make Blaine its newest home. But when you line the stadium's price tag up against the rest of what's under construction at 105th Avenue, Nassau Street and Radisson Road, the ballpark stops looking like the point of the project and starts looking like the hook.
| Piece of The Farm | Approximate Cost |
|---|---|
| Baseball stadium (5,000 seats) | $71 million |
| Scheels flagship store (250,000 sq ft) | $150 million |
| Everything else: apartments, hotel, retail, restaurants, medical office, parks and trails | roughly $529 million |
| Total project | $750 million |
The ballpark is less than a tenth of the money. The Scheels store alone, with its 16,000-gallon saltwater aquarium stocked with more than 600 fish and an indoor Ferris wheel, costs more than double what the stadium does. The city council backed that store with an $84 million tax incentive package approved last year, on top of the $63 million in bonds it agreed to issue for the stadium itself (the remaining $8 million of stadium cost comes from private investment, with the team's ownership group paying down the bond debt through a lease). Add a 240-room hotel from a national chain, roughly 450 apartments, pickleball courts, and a medical office, and the ballpark reads less like the anchor of the district and more like the loudest tenant in a much bigger building.
Why Build a Stadium You Don't Need for Baseball
Here's the part that only makes sense once you already know Blaine's sports economy. This city isn't adding baseball because it lacks sports infrastructure. The National Sports Center, which opened in 1990 and sits right next to The Farm, draws more than 4 million visitors a year and generated an estimated $71 million in direct visitor spending across 63 events in 2024. A few weeks earlier this summer, the PGA Tour's 3M Open brought roughly 100,000 spectators to TPC Twin Cities and an estimated $50 million in regional economic impact, by one industry estimate. Blaine has spent years perfecting the tournament weekend: thousands of visitors in for two or three days, then gone.
What Blaine doesn't have is a reason for those same visitors, or its own residents, to spend a random Tuesday night in town. That's the gap a 100-game minor league season is built to fill. League commissioner Joshua Schaub called the stadium "a cultural platform for the city" at the groundbreaking, describing it as a place "where children can meet professional players, where youth baseball and softball will grow, where grandparents can share the game with their grandchildren." The turf field and 3,034 fixed seats aren't accidental design choices. A venue that can pivot from a ballgame to a concert to a lacrosse match to a graduation ceremony is a venue built to stay busy on the nights when nothing else in the surrounding 70 acres is drawing anyone in yet.
Put differently, the ballpark is the cheapest way to guarantee foot traffic for the far more expensive retail and housing sitting next to it.
The Skeptic Who Signed On
Not everyone who saw the plan believed in it right away. Developer Corey Burstad, now one of the partners behind The Farm, has talked about seeing an early concept presented to the city council on a cold February night years ago, back when he was just a Blaine resident there for unrelated business.
"I think I said, well, this is not gonna work. This is terrible. And I was just a resident there for something else, for a different business matter. And I remember leaving there very upset as a resident."
That reaction is what pushed him to call Mayor Sanders, and eventually developer Robb Bader, about getting involved. City Manager Erik Thorvig described the finished vision at the groundbreaking as "a generational project that is going to change the city of Blaine, Anoka County and the National Sports Center forever." Mayor Sanders put it more plainly, calling the district the new "heart of the city" and noting that residents have been asking for more entertainment and dining options for years.
What Actually Opens, and When
For a project this size, the timeline matters more than the announcement date. Here's what's confirmed so far:
- 2016: The city began acquiring aging 1970s-era warehouses along 105th Avenue, the first step toward assembling the roughly 70-acre site.
- Late 2022: After interviewing several development firms, the city selected Elevage and Bader as master developer for the area.
- August 12, 2026: Groundbreaking held. The Farm named as the project's official title. The stadium's future tenant announced, though officials had not yet named the team itself.
- End of 2027: Some dining options are expected to open, according to city officials.
- Early 2028: The stadium, the Scheels flagship, and the bulk of the district are targeted to open.
That's a twelve-year span from first land purchase to ribbon cutting, which is worth sitting with if you've heard "transformative" thrown around and pictured something arriving overnight. Supporting road work is moving on a similar scale. The Minnesota Department of Transportation is in the middle of a $201 million reconstruction of Highway 65 through Blaine, funded by $168 million in state money and $33 million in federal funds, aimed at improving traffic flow along the same corridor.
A City That's Already Used to This
None of this is happening to a town caught off guard by growth. Census Bureau estimates put Blaine's population at 72,488 in 2024, up from 70,222 in the 2020 count. That's modest year-over-year growth, but it's steady, and it's the kind of backdrop that makes a $750 million bet look less like a gamble and more like a city extending a pattern it already knows how to run: build the infrastructure for big weekends, then figure out what to do with it the rest of the week.
The baseball team gives The Farm a schedule and a reason to show up on a Wednesday in June. The Scheels store, the housing, and the hotel are the part of the bet that has to pay off for the other 265 days a year. Whether that math works is the actual story here, and it's one that won't be settled by a groundbreaking. It'll be settled by whether the ballpark's turnstiles are still spinning in year three.
If you're watching projects like this because you're curious what they mean for property values, traffic patterns, or which part of Blaine might be worth a second look down the road, that's exactly the kind of local read Maisa Olson tracks year-round. Book a free valuation consultation and we can talk through what a $750 million neighbor actually means for your corner of town.
