Byline: Jack Etkin Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer
Reality has yet to intrude in spring training, elbowing aside hope in a crush of blown saves and fizzled rallies. Even teams with no chance of contending can legitimately wonder in the Florida and Arizona sun how high is up while pondering improvement.
Spring training dates from the 1880s, when a few clubs began seeking a midwinter escape to warmer weather for preseason conditioning. The National League's Boston Beaneaters went to New Orleans in 1884. Cap Anson took his Chicago Colts to Hot Springs, Ark., in 1886, the same year Harry Wright, who managed the Philadelphia Phillies, found a haven for his players in Charleston, S.C.
It wasn't until 1914 that more than two teams trained in Florida. That year, Connie Mack, owner and manager of the Philadelphia Athletics, returned to Jacksonville, where his team had spent the spring of 1903. And both St. Louis teams traveled to Florida, the Cardinals working out in St. Augustine and the Browns in St. Petersburg. However, both St. Louis teams left Florida for Texas in 1915.
The 1920s land boom in Florida established spring training in the state. Besides the St. Louis teams and the Athletics, the Yankees, Dodgers, Phillies, Reds and Senators took up long-term residency in Florida that went uninterrupted until World War II.
Datelines such as Bear Mountain, N.Y.; French Lick, Ind.; Cairo, Ill.; Wallingford, Conn.; Wilmington, Del.; Lakewood, N.J.; College Park, Md., and Medford, Mass., appeared on spring-training stories from 1943 to 1945 because of wartime travel restrictions. Teams were forced to train closer to home, halting their barnstorming tours as they came north by train to start the season.
Barnstorming flourished because of Babe Ruth, whose impact on spring training was enormous. Longer exhibition schedules developed, along with increased media coverage, because Ruth was such an unprecedented attraction with the Yankees. After he hit a season-record 60 homers in 1927, the Yankees drew 270,000 to their exhibition games the following spring, enabling owner Col. Jacob Ruppert to clear an astounding profit of $60,000.
Arizona didn't get in on the spring action until after World War II. The Detroit Tigers ventured to Phoenix in 1929, but it was 18 years before a team returned to Arizona. Bill Veeck, who bought the Cleveland Indians in 1946, had a ranch in Tucson, where the Indians began training in 1947 and stayed until they left for Florida and were replaced by the Rockies in 1993.
That was the spring both Roberto Mejia and Jason Bates were impressive in big-league camp for the Rockies before opening the season at Class AAA Colorado Springs. Young players competing with a nothing-to-lose enthusiasm against experienced major leaguers are a spring joy. In sobering contrast, though, is the plight of an aging veteran like Harold Reynolds trying unsuccessfully to make the Rockies last year. Limitless opportunity, an indulgence of youth, is replaced by a do-it-now imperative for the older player.
There is an unmistakable tranquility to spring training that simply can't be found during the regular season when most of the games are at night and winning does matter. Spring training is hearing a metronomic whack . . . whack . . . whack at 7:30 a.m. when the outfield grass still is damp with dew. It's the sound of hard contact from a batting cage, the diamond equivalent of songbirds heralding another morning.
Spring training actually unfolds in three acts. Pitchers and catchers report first in mid-February, along with position players recovering from injuries. The full squad reports less than a week later. The drills are beginning to drag when the tempo quickens at the beginning of March and the exhibition games begin.
These games produce scorecards cluttered beyond belief but do little to foreshadow the regular season. Roger Angell of The New Yorker wrote ``spring baseball is all surmise.'' It still is, 28 years after he made that observation.
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By Dan Gibson / Rocky Mountain News.
