Spring training baseball, for the uninitiated, is the single best thing about spring in Arizona, and probably any spring, anywhere.
Spring training began as a way for players to play themselves back into shape after an offseason spent doing other things. In the days before big paychecks, most players worked other jobs in the offseason, and needed the spring to remember how to play.
Now, most players train rigorously in the winter. There’s always a visible exception or two, but the vast majority of players report to spring training more or less ready to play.
So spring training may be an anachronism, but it’s a brilliant one.
And Arizona is lucky to have spring training baseball. The story of the Cactus League is one of almost coincidental decisions. One team, then another, came to Arizona, drawn by sunnier weather and room to build stadiums, and mostly they stayed. Fifteen teams now train here.
If we’re lucky, they always will.
It’s always a shock to realize how easy it is to see a spring training game. Parking is usually easy. Lawn seating is the price of a movie ticket. As expensive as the average regular season sports ticket has become, it’s almost strange to go to a game for so little.
There is simplicity to the game in spring. It’s not exactly innocent. Players are competing for spots, some veterans are facing the end of their careers, a few prospects every year figure out they may not have what it takes. It’s not innocent, but it’s simpler.
Baseball’s origins are pastoral — a field, the sun, the buzz of calm conversation and the occasional roar of a crowd — and spring training is closer to the roots of baseball than any other modern sport can hope to get to their own pasts.
The spring season exists as a sign of hope to colder places. There’s baseball somewhere, so spring must be coming, against all evidence. It’s a renewal of sorts. Spring is a time to shake off the winter. We do it ourselves while it happens on the field.
The spring is also an affirmation of place. The pace of life is somehow slower. Each stadium has its own feel, and for a while Chicago blooms in Mesa, where the Cubs play, and San Francisco moves to Scottsdale, and all of it happens in an Arizona that is nearly the perfect form of Arizona, the best this place can be.
So go.
Go early. Sit in the grass on a towel. Walk around for a while, then nap, then watch a few innings. Go back again and again, as many times as you can, while you can.
Bart Giamatti, a commissioner of baseball and one of its poets, might have been describing spring training in his essay “The Green Fields of the Mind”:
“I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.”
It won’t last forever, but here’s to spring.
Reach Will at wmunsil@asu.edu
