March Serenity
An ode to Spring Training
March is an underrated month. The old adage is that it comes in as a lion and goes out like a lamb. This might be true when it comes to weather, depending on where you live— Kansas weather is rarely that predictable— but the opposite is actually more accurate in regard to sports.
The latter half of the month is dominated by March Madness, the NCAA Basketball Tournament. I may be writing about baseball, but I’m also a huge basketball fan, and I’m not ashamed to admit that the Tournament is the single best and most intense event in all of sports. (Take that World Cup and Super Bowl.) I’d also like to point out that the Kansas Jayhawks are the reigning champs, just in case anyone needs reminding.
In recent years— global pandemics and labor strife notwithstanding— the last week of March has also marked the beginning of baseball’s regular season. I’m not sure how I feel about this development, especially whenever I see the Royals taking the field against biting winds with temperatures hovering around the freezing mark, or catch highlights of the Twins or Tigers playing in snow, but it feels inevitable that every major sports league is going to keep expanding its footprint across the calendar. Nevertheless, Opening Day is always exciting, and should be a national holiday, in my opinion.
The beginning of the month, on the other hand, is much more laid back. Spring Training usually starts around mid-February, when pitchers and catchers report to camp, but really hits its stride right around the time that the calendar flips over to March.
Some fans will roll their eyes over getting excited about meaningless exhibition games featuring a bunch of players we’ll never hear from again, but I am not one of them. And judging by the countdowns to the opening of camp that I regularly see on social media, I’m not the only one.
Spring is always a time of renewal and often unrealistic expectations, and nowhere is that truer than in Florida and Arizona, where MLB’s thirty teams gather every February and March to begin a new season. It’s the one time of year that fans can delude themselves into believing their team might actually have a shot of contending, no matter how much evidence to the contrary is staring them right back in the face.
Perhaps no team excels in this respect more than my own Kansas City Royals. They have won or finished near the top of the standings in both the Grapefruit and Cactus Leagues numerous times in my life, only to turn around and routinely crush the hopes they’d fostered by falling out of contention before May Day. At over forty years of age, I’ve learned to somewhat temper my expectations, but they still manage to suck me in on a regular basis.
I can’t help it. I love Spring Training. Even as a kid, I loved the novelty of it. If I happened to be walking through the living room while my parents were watching the news and the anchor threw it to the sports guy reporting live from the Royals’ facility in Florida, my ears immediately perked up. Sure, such a thing presaged the coming of warmer temperatures, and more importantly, the return of baseball, but it wasn’t just about what it foretold. Spring Training was an attraction in its own right.
I couldn’t wait to turn on the radio and hear the voices of legendary Royals announcers, Denny Matthews and Fred White, welcoming baseball back into my home. Very few Spring Training games were televised back then, so I had to depend on the radio. This presented a few drawbacks.
Part of the allure of Spring Training baseball was seeing the smaller, less conventional ballparks, many of which had features like sprawling patches of grass used for general admission, allowing fans to stretch out a blanket and take in the game in a more casual repose. It was the sort of thing you would never see in a MLB stadium, at least not at that time, but it added to the whole relaxed vibe that permeated Spring Training.
In this respect, the Royals took a backseat to no one during my childhood. Prior to the 1988 season, Kansas City moved its spring camp from Fort Myers, Florida to a facility in Davenport called Baseball City. Fun side note— my brother-in-law recently moved with his wife to Davenport. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to visit Baseball City when we go see them. The facility was bulldozed in 2005, and is currently the site of a retail complex.
Oh well, I doubt I would have appreciated it as a grown man anyway. But I wanted to go so bad when I was a kid. The property was owned by Harcourt Brace— you might remember them as the publisher of many of your textbooks in school— and they had the idea of combining an old boardwalk amusement park with the ballpark. The highlight of this concept was a Ferris wheel overlooking the field. I desperately wanted to watch just an inning or two from the top of it.
On paper, Baseball City sounded like a brilliant idea. Two major obstacles worked against it, however. The first was largely self-inflicted. After signing the Royals to a fifteen-year contract, Harcourt poured most of its money and attention into the 8,000-seat stadium and the baseball facilities. This was great for the team, but it meant that the amusement park side of the complex remained a dump, drawing few paying visitors on its own. This wasn’t a big deal during the spring, but after the Royals packed up and went back to Kansas City, it meant the facility turned into a ghost town. The Baseball City Royals, Kansas City’s single A affiliate, played their regular season there from 1988-92, but this only marginally helped with the attendance problems.
The second issue seems like it should have been obvious in hindsight, but apparently didn’t trouble the masterminds behind Baseball City’s launch. Upon further thought, however, perhaps opening up a second-rate amusement park in Disney World’s backyard was not the soundest business decision.
Harcourt sold the property to Anheuser-Busch after only a year in business, and the owners of Busch Gardens shuttered the amusement park in 1990. By 1993, most of it was torn down, but the Royals continued to use the stadium and baseball facilities until they moved to Surprise, Arizona in 2003.
Young me was oblivious to most of this. Like I said, most of my Spring Training experiences came over the radio waves. My sole glimpses of the Ferris Wheel and the cool alternate uniforms the teams only wore in Spring Training (this was long before merchandise sales inspired teams to come up with a different uniform for every night of the week) came through highlights and nightly news reports. So after the amusement park portion of the facility was long gone, I was still imagining a thriving destination of unrivaled fun. I mean, it combined rollercoasters and baseball— how could that not kick Disney World’s ass?
As I said, spring is a time for harmless delusions. And like this newsletter, mine revolved around baseball. Spring Training baseball is a unique animal though, and one must adjust their expectations accordingly in order to properly appreciate it.
When I was a kid, the most intriguing aspect of spring baseball was the unusual matchups. This was largely due to geography. For the uninitiated, allow me to go on a brief tangent to explain the basic setup of Spring Training baseball.
The first team to adopt the idea of Spring Training was the New York Mutuals in 1869. The Mutuals were owned by Boss Tweed. Yes, that Boss Tweed, if you know your American history or have at least seen Gangs of New York. The fact that the notoriously corrupt politician owned a baseball team sounds too perfect to be true, but it is. With apologies to the handful of truly great owners baseball has seen over the years, it would be difficult to find a more appropriate patriarch for a group of people who have so consistently proven themselves unbelievably selfish, greedy, and power-hungry.
In this case, however, Tweed actually was looking out for someone else. Aw, who are we kidding? He probably had some sinister angle on the side, but he also wanted his team to get a jump on the season by going someplace warmer than New York to practice. He settled for New Orleans. Over the next few decades, teams followed their lead and used a number of Southern sites for their preseason practices.
After many of them settled in Florida, the Grapefruit League was officially formed in 1914 to allow teams to play exhibitions games before heading back north for the regular season. Spring Training was centered exclusively in Florida until 1947.
Bill Veeck, one of those previously mentioned “good guy” owners, was watching a game in Ocala, Florida when security began to hassle him for sitting in the COLORED section of the bleachers. Not being a racist asshole, Veeck had a problem with this for various reasons. The next year, after buying a stake in the Cleveland Indians, Veeck convinced the New York Giants to join Cleveland for Spring Training in Arizona, and he signed Larry Doby, the American League’s first black player as another middle finger to segregated Florida.
Thus, the Cactus League was born. The balance of teams would continue to reside in Florida for many years— as recently as 1989, there were 18 teams in Florida, and only 8 in Arizona— but as of 2018, it is an even 15-15 split between locales.
This was far more significant when I was a kid, mainly because it offered us our only opportunity (outside of whoever played in the World Series) to see American League teams play National League teams. With the introduction of interleague play in 1997, this has become old hat in regular season games that actually count, but in the 80’s it was quite the little thrill for seamheads like me.
Seeing the Royals matchup against NL teams like the Mets and Dodgers was a cool perk, even if the end result didn’t matter. If anything, the novelty of the matchups made up for the lack of overall stakes. They made Spring Training baseball stand out. And the games I looked forward to the most every spring were undoubtedly the matchups with the St. Louis Cardinals.
It would be incorrect to label the Royals and Cardinals rivals back then, but I do think you could make a better case for it in the 80’s than you can now, even though they have regularly played each other in meaningful regular season games every year since 1997. Well, meaningful might be a stretch. Between the contrasting overall fortunes of each club, and the Cardinals’ head-to-head dominance, it’s difficult to use the word rivalry in relation to such a one-sided affair.
But in the 80’s, it was easier to pretend that a rivalry might exist. Sure, the Cardinals had much more history and traditional success, but the Royals had reeled off an incredibly successful decade from 1975-85, and they were still regularly fielding relevant teams as the 80’s came to an end. And more importantly, in the only time they had played each other with something real on the line, the 1985 World Series, the Royals had come out on top.
Every time the Royals played the Cardinals in Spring Training, it was an excuse to relive the greatest sports moment of my childhood. It didn’t matter that more and more of the names from the 1985 World Series changed each year. As long as a few of the them still rang a bell (Brett, White, McGee, Pendleton, etc.), the memories came rolling back all the same. If the Royals won, it was another victory chalked up against the “bad guys.” And if they lost, oh well. I could shrug it off as a meaningless preseason game and remind everyone, including myself, that the Royals had won the games that mattered most in ’85.
With any luck, the weather would be nice at home— never a given in northeast Kansas at any point in March— and inspired by the game on the radio, I could throw on a hoodie and run outside to reenact the game I’d just listened to and speculate on what the fast approaching season might hold for my beloved Royals and the rest of the league.
Spring Training is often a mirage though. Just as a seventy-degree Kansas day in early March might feel like the promise of early summer, only to be followed by a snowstorm two days later, the results of Spring Training are usually fool’s gold.
I mentioned earlier how the Royals are very adept at succeeding in the spring, only to crash and burn once the real games start, but this phenomenon is even more exaggerated in individual players. As I’ve grown older, I’ve become more well-versed in prospects than I was as a kid. So I have a better idea of what to expect from the no-name guys who populate Spring Training lineups. Even so, there are always guys who come from out of nowhere and electrify the fanbase, only to faceplant when the regular season starts, before being demoted and never heard from again.
Compiling a list of those guys is tricky, especially when I try to reach back for examples from the Powder Blue Nostalgia era (1985-94), because they are by definition extremely forgettable. The best recent example I can come up with is Peter O’Brien. A power-hitting 1B/OF acquired by a Royals team that still viewed itself as a contender, O’Brien captured everyone’s attention by smacking dingers left and right during the 2017 spring schedule. Even the guys-in-the-know projected him to make the roster and force his way into playing time.
Instead, O’Brien failed to make the cut as the team broke camp, and started the season in AAA Omaha. Less than two months later, he was designated for assignment by the Royals in May. He caught on with the Rangers, but never played in the majors that year. Over four partial MLB seasons, he hit .209/.275/.434 with 11 HR. He’s played the last several years in other countries, primarily Mexico.
He's far from the only Spring Training All-Star out there. In an effort to come up with some more examples, I turned to social media for help. If the names Gary Scott (3B for the Cubs, 1991-92), Mike Stenhouse (OF Expos, 1982-84), Tracy Jones (OF Reds, 1986-88), Mike Brown (OF Angels, 1983-85), or Gilberto Reyes (C Dodgers, 1983-88) are familiar to you, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Then there are players like Clint Hurdle. A little before my time, Hurdle didn’t come from off the radar. Featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated in the spring of 1978 with the caption: “This Year’s Phenom,” Hurdle tore through the spring after a fantastic run in the minors. Notoriously moody hitting coach Charlie Lau even called him “the best hitting prospect I’ve ever seen in our organization.” Keep in mind that Lau coached Amos Otis, Willie Wilson, Frank White, and a guy by the name of George Brett, among others.
But Hurdle could never put it all together when it counted. He stuck it out for a few years, contributing as a fairly mediocre platoon player on the 1980 AL Champion Royals, before Willie Wilson pushed him out altogether. He bounced around to a few more stops, retiring young, and acknowledging that he would never be a great player. He did turn out to be a pretty outstanding manager though, leading the Colorado Rockies (2002-09, including the 2007 World Series) and Pittsburgh Pirates (2011-19) to successful stints.
All of these players are proof that Spring Training stats should be taken with a grain of salt, though a recent study suggests they may not be completely worthless. According to it, evaluators should ignore home runs, slugging percentage, and batting average. These are notoriously dodgy in small sample sizes, and especially in Arizona, where the ball tends to travel well, HR stats are extremely unreliable. But more advanced stats, like strikeout rate, walk rate, and even isolated power can provide some clarity when assessing a player’s value, if he has no other track record to go on.
For more established players who’ve already proven they can perform when the lights are on, spring starts are hardly worth a glance. Sure, a strong spring performance is never a bad thing, but it rarely correlates to what will happen over the following six months. Less than stellar stats aren’t anything to sweat over. The key for veterans is to spend the spring getting back into the swing of things, staying loose, and making it to Opening Day healthy.
There are few things in baseball more frustrating than a Spring Training injury. I’ve personally experienced this as a fan in recent years. First, Salvador Perez tore his MCL in 2018 carrying some luggage up the stairs as he was preparing to leave Arizona. Then, he tore his UCL the following spring, requiring Tommy John surgery and forcing him to miss the entire season. Fortunately, he came back as good as ever in 2020.
Not all players are as lucky. In 1994, the Milwaukee Brewers front office was looking to inspire the team in the spring, so they brought in an act called Radical Reality to motivate them with a presentation of bodybuilding and feats of strength. Taking his cue from the performers, knuckleball pitcher Steve Sparks attempted to tear a phone book in half, but only succeeded in dislocating his shoulder and temporarily derailing his career.
No one ever said baseball players weren’t capable of acting like idiots. For every Mookie Wilson, who missed part of the 1986 season when he took a line drive to the face in the spring, shattering his sunglasses and injuring his eye in a fluke accident through no fault of his own, there are probably ten examples of guys like Hunter Pence, who wasn’t paying attention to where he was going in the spring of 2008 and walked straight through a sliding glass door.
Unfortunately, one of the best Spring Training injury stories appears to be an urban legend. HOF pitcher John Smoltz has repeatedly gone out of his way to disprove the rumors regarding a burn he suffered on his stomach early in his career. The story goes that he tried to steam his wrinkled shirt with an iron while he was still wearing it. He claims that he wasn’t wearing the shirt (or any shirt at all, for that matter), and when he set down the iron, some of the water splashed out and scalded his stomach.
I don’t know which version of the story is true, though Smoltz has never struck me as a dummy. But despite the unflattering light in which it paints him, I think I prefer the rumored version. It’s ridiculous and fun, which is the essence of Spring Training, after all. Nothing about it should be taken too seriously. It is, at best, an imperfect exercise.
One of its chief imperfections is that Spring Training is too long. I’m not sure how to solve that. I don’t necessarily want to push Truck Day (the day the clubs pack up and depart their home stadium for Florida or Arizona) and pitchers and catchers reporting back, because who wants to delay baseball, and I definitely don’t want the regular season to start any earlier than it already does. But after a couple weeks of laid-back exhibition games that don’t mean anything, the thrill quickly wears off and we’re all ready for the real thing.
I felt that way even as a kid, but if I ever expected to eventually lose interest in the spectacle of Spring Training altogether as I got older, I was mistaken. If anything, I appreciate it even more the older I get. I never hated winter as a kid (in fact, I kind of liked it), but forty-three-year-old me has grown increasingly less enamored with it every year.
After several months of snow and freezing temperatures, I get restless. I want to go outside without a coat on. I want to feel the warmth of the sun beating down on my skin. And most of all, I want baseball. Each year I get more and more impatient, and one of these days I’m going to jump in the car and finally drive to Arizona to attend Spring Training in person. No more waiting for Opening Day!
I mentioned this a few years back to my wife, and was mildly surprised when she responded enthusiastically. To be fair, I shouldn’t have been shocked. While not the fan I am, she has always indulged my baseball obsession. She let me drag her to a minor league baseball game in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and didn’t complain when I scheduled two MLB games (Busch-St. Louis and Wrigley-Chicago) into our most recent family vacation. I don’t think my first wife would have gone along with that. I’m not saying that’s the primary reason my first marriage fell apart (or even in the top fifty), but in hindsight, it probably should have been a red flag. As such, I’m simply grateful that I finally found my soulmate.
The real world doesn’t always comply with true love though. Between Covid in 2020 and 2021, and the labor lockout that canceled most of the preseason in 2022, we have yet to make the trip south. But who knows? This could be our year.
After all, that is the unofficial mantra of Spring Training every year.
Thanks for reading Powder Blue Nostalgia, and make sure you subscribe if you haven’t already. And don’t forget to leave your favorite Spring Training memories in the comments below.