TAMPA, Florida (CNN/Money) - Baseball's spring training traditionally has been the most delusional event in major sports.

Veteran ballplayers show up believing last season's falloff in their performance was simply a bad year, not the beginning of the end of their careers. Rookies show up believing that a great showing will allow them to win a starting job and make the team's starting lineup.

Fans show up believing their team's off-season moves filled in the final piece of the puzzle to have the team winning the World Series.

And, the biggest delusion of all, the cities and towns that host the exhibitions believe that they can make money off stadiums and grounds used for a month's worth of games at the height of tourist season.

Karen Nelson and her boyfriend Scott Chismar enjoy visiting spring training, but like many tourists attending the game said they would have been in Florida even without the games.

It's been a delusion I've enjoyed participating in for a bit more than a decade now, having traveled to Florida with my father and brother to watch our favorite team, play some very bad golf (the ultimate delusion is that I'll learn the game one day), and visit with one another.

We would seem to be the proof that at least the economic development delusion would have something to it -- the cheap $12 tickets to each game are the smallest part of vacation spending that also includes restaurants, greens fees, hotels and rental cars.

But even as the occasional prospect does make the team, the dollars spent by me and my family don't mean that most cities and towns that spend millions on new training facilities aren't kidding themselves about the economic worth of that investment. There are signs that despite continued new building with tax dollars, more and more localities are finally waking up to reality.

Florida estimates that 51 percent of the spring training tickets sold in 2000 went to out-of-state visitors, or just over 800,000 during the month of March. Its study also estimates that those visitors spent $450 million to $490 million across the state on their spring training trips.

About $30 million in tax money was spent building Legends Field for the Yankees in Tampa, but it was probably a better deal for taxpayers than the $170 million Raymond James Stadium, home of the NFL Buccaneers, across the street.

But those numbers are probably inflated. First of all, I believe that most of the 800,000 tickets were sold to visitors who attended more than one game during their trip, which cuts the number of visitors to the state by at least half. Every other out-of-state fan I spoke with was going to at least three games, as my family did this trip. Some were going to see twice that many.

And, talking to other fans during this most recent trip, I found that while some traveled the way we did just to watch the games, about half the out-of-state residents said they would have been visiting the state with or without spring training.

"It's fun and it's a change of pace," said Orioles' fan Karen Nelson, who with her boyfriend Scott Chismar escaped the snow of Buffalo to see about five games earlier this month.

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The day I met them they were following the sun around Dunedin Stadium, where the Toronto Blue Jays train. It was their ninth spring training -- the chance to get close to Cal Ripken on an earlier trip sold them on the experience. But Nelson said she'd be visiting Florida to see her folks anyway.

"Without spring training, we might pick a different week, but we'd be here anyway," she said.

Some cities are starting to learn that spending tens of millions on new stadium complexes isn't the best use of tax dollars.

The Kansas City Royals have been searching for a new spring home for about 10 years, ever since the owner of their central Florida training facility announced in 1992 it thought it could put the land to better use in another way. But no Florida locale made a serious bid for the team, and after its lease runs out this month the franchise will relocate to Arizona and share a facility with the Texas Rangers.

"We didn't feel there were any viable options for us in Florida," said Herk Robinson, the team's chief operating officer. "We thought for a while something in Naples might pan out, but it didn't come through. I can't say we contacted every chamber of commerce in the state, but it was very known that we were free to leave at anytime and we had to leave after 2002."

But the team did find a city in Arizona to build a $46 million facility with tax dollars.

Florida is also spending some tax dollars. Dunedin was one of four existing stadiums that each used $15 million in state tax dollars last year for upgrades. And the New York Yankees got Hillsborough County to spend $30 million to build them a new complex in Tampa in 1996 -- even though team owner George Steinbrenner is a Tampa resident who made no secret of his desire to relocate the team there.

Still, in the world of sports delusions, spending on baseball spring training facilities is a relatively mild one.

Looming across the street from the Yankees' Legends Field is Raymond James Stadium, the home of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers football team, which cost $170 million to build in 1998. The team's eight home games are about half of what any baseball team plays in spring training, and while it holds about seven times as many fans as Legends Field, just about all those fans today are in-state residents.

So just because spring training is a time of delusion doesn't mean that it doesn't occasionally live up to all its hopes.