Why We Love Spring Training
It Happens Every Winter. People Love Spring Training Even When They’re Not There to See It.
There is much about sports I will never understand. The Big Ten Network being on my suburban Boston cable system. Why supposedly ultra-cynical New Yorkers continue to take the Knicks seriously. But the biggest mystery of all, one I have pondered my whole life without a glimmer of understanding, is the enduring popularity of baseball’s spring training as a second-hand experience.
In person, spring training is a delight, starting with the fact that in Florida and Arizona, it is already spring. The non-grueling pace of baseball practice means spectators in Fort Myers can divide their day into two neat parts. Watch the Sox work out in the morning, then hit the beach or the links in the afternoon. When the exhibition games start next week, fans need only reverse that schedule.
No wonder folks from here and everywhere else flock to burgs like Fort Myers, Clearwater, Florida and Tempe, Arizona to bask in the most stress free experience in all of fandom. Whatever happens, it’s just practice. So what if Rick Porcello gives up six runs in his first two Grapefruit League innings? He got his work in, that’s the important thing. Now it’s time for dinner. You don’t have to wear socks!
But for every fan who makes that delightful pilgrimage, 100 or more do not. They remain trapped in the everyday life of their particular big league city. Yes, the weather’s nicer in LA today than it is in Boston, but that doesn’t make the 405 any easier to navigate. Urban stress comes in an infinite variety of forms.
We have come to the mystery. Those fans who DON’T go to spring training consume journalism about it as avidly as if it were vintage Champagne. They did so long before I was born and will be doing so long after I enter baseball Heaven or the permanent Hot Stove League as the case may be. Look at this very Website. It is chock-full of stories and images about spring training, a process in which the Sox have yet to take their first batting practice against live pitching. People are enjoying the vicarious thrill of watching men play catch and pitchers covering first base.
Past sportswriting experience lets me know this popularity is a concrete fact of baseball life. All local news organizations spend a good deal of money on spring training (it’s sending people to a winter vacation spot in peak season). Those organizations covered spring training in the dead ball era, when a trip to Florida was as far outside the average American’s experience as a trip to China – and nearly as expensive. I assure you this wouldn’t happen if news businesses didn’t have tangible evidence of return on investment.
But I don’t get it. Try as I might, although I don’t, I will never share the public fondness for spring training tales. They offer six solid weeks of media evergreens, stories as fresh and fascinating as videos of the Mayor serving turkey to the homeless on Thanksgiving Day. And what puzzles me most is that I know the audience for those stories knows how stale they are and doesn’t care.
Fans may be irrational, but they’re not dumb. The most intense Red Sox followers know the optimistic noises coming out of Fort Myers are coming out of 29 other big league camps at the same time. They have to be aware that a headline such as “Papi arrives in camp in great shape’’ was undoubtedly written about Babe Ruth in 1915 and every other spring training of his career. Most of all, they know there is no relationship between spring training news and the actual season, unless heaven forbid an important player gets injured. Remembering last season is all Red Sox fans need to perceive that truth.
One theory about spring training’s outsized importance in the sports media universe, often stated by chirpy local news anchors, is that prisoners of the frozen North see pictures of sunny Florida or sunnier Arizona as a promise of better weather to come. I am skeptical. In the room where this piece was typed, there’s a window. What I see out there makes it very difficult to imagine a Boston without snow and ice. If Northerners crave second-hard warmth so much, why doesn’t the Travel Channel get higher ratings?
And as any Red Sox fan over the age of seven is well aware, it’s not as if Opening Day itself is any promise of balmy conditions at Fenway Park. Most April and some early May games there are conducted in temperatures more suited to parkas and hot chocolate than cold beer and flip-flops. Native Floridian Wade Boggs once asked “why do we spend six weeks in 70 degree weather to practice for games that start in 40 degree weather?’’ and no one has answered him yet.
After years of consideration, my best guess is that spring training’s popularity has more to do with time than temperature. The other three major team sports appeal to the senses through kinetic and often violent action. Baseball is slow by design and will remain so whether or not David Ortiz keeps one foot in the batter’s box at all times. It can’t help itself. At the same time the sport is instituting new rules to speed the pace of play, it is considering altering the strike zone to benefit hitters. Nothing slows the game down like the 3-2 counts that change would generate.
Since baseball remains both enormously popular and profitable, it must be assumed its customers like the sensation of slowing down. They consider it valuable enough to pay for. Spring training is when baseball time comes as close as it can to standing still. Compared to today’s Red Sox practice, a June regular season game with the Twins is the Daytona 500.
So here’s my solution to my ancient riddle. People like reading and watching stories about spring training because they crave participation in a part of life where nothing’s happening.
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