The Boys of Spring
A definitive look at preseason baseball, yesterday and today
Under the March Sun: The Story of Spring Training, by Charles Fountain (Oxford University Press; 322 pages; $24.95)
Spring training—like spring itself —is about metamorphosis. Players, rusty from months away from major-league play, become athletes who perform with grace and skill. Individuals with towering egos meld as a team.
In Under the March Sun: The Story of Spring Training, associate journalism professor Charles Fountain chronicles these transformations and more in a comprehensive, entertaining look at what many call the best six weeks in all of sports.
Over time, of course, spring training has undergone its own metamorphosis. As Fountain recounts, “Starting a century ago, every year in late February, men left their winter jobs on the farm, or at the lumberyard or hardware store, or driving a cab in the city, and made their way south—to Florida, mostly, though also to Texas, Georgia, or Arkansas. There, under the March sun, they sweat out a winter’s lethargy and fried foods, harden once again muscles and calluses that have grown soft, and ready themselves for another season of baseball.”
Today, Fountain explains, the tableau is different. Multimillionaire players arrive at camp needing only to make slight adjustments to “the precise and finely tuned asset that is the modern athlete’s body.” Players are hailed as demigods, not the less-than-savory rough-and-tumble visitors they were once deemed.
Perhaps most strikingly, the preseason games that fans still prize for their intimacy and relaxed sense of fun have become a billion-dollar industry.
As he looks back at the games’ history, Fountain effectively sifts facts from lore. Though Chicago White Stockings player-manager Cap Anson is generally credited with originating spring training in the mid-1880s, political-machine czar “Boss” Tweed may have gotten the ball rolling first when he sent an amateur team, the New York Mutuals, to New Orleans to prep for the 1869 season.
By the late 1880s, more teams were participating in spring training than not. Florida’s Grapefruit League was born in 1920. Over the next decade, Al Lang, a former mayor of St. Petersburg, used preseason games as a way of bringing tourists to his beloved city, and the entire state. His efforts helped make Florida the center of the spring-training world, a position it held for more than thirty years.
Arizona’s Cactus League, which got its start in 1947 after the Cleveland Indians started training in Tucson, would soon cement spring training’s geographical sweep.
But it took the Houston Astros to turn the preseason into a crowd-pleasing juggernaut. In 1985, the team moved into a modern, carefully designed spring-training complex and stadium in Kissimmee, Florida. The Astros quickly saw a 25 percent jump in game attendance. Immediately, Fountain writes, other teams decided to “mine this gold.” Over the next two and a half decades, nineteen spring-training facilities were built in Florida and Arizona.
Like any good baseball chronicle, Under the March Sun serves as a compelling cultural history. Fountain delivers a terrific chapter on Wendell Smith, an African American sportswriter who led the fight to integrate baseball, both in the stories he wrote and behind the scenes. Smith served as a sounding board for Brooklyn Dodgers president Branch Rickey before Rickey signed Jackie Robinson in 1945, and was an early mentor to Robinson himself. Just a decade later, more than 10 percent of major-league players were black.
Dodgertown, the Dodgers’ famous spring-training center in Vero Beach, Florida, also looms large in the book. During the Jim Crow era, Dodger players, black and white, lived and ate together in this self-sufficient complex (complete with a man-made fishing hole and a golf course), beyond the reach of segregation laws governing the surrounding area’s hotels and restaurants.
The Dodgers remain the only major-league team ever to have owned their own spring-training facilities. In recent years, warm-weather cities have devoted—and many more consider devoting—sizable amounts of public money to building spring-training palaces they believe will put them on the map.
In 2005, Cape Coral, Florida, was saddled with poor roads, and a poor water and sewer system. Yet, for a time, officials contemplated spending town funds to build a $40 million complex—hoping that, if they built it, teams would come, bringing economic development along with them.
To the west, Glendale, Arizona, is currently “grabbing at professional sports the way a glutton goes for the drumstick,” Fountain writes. The wooing has worked. As of this year, the city is the new springtime host of both the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Chicago White Sox.
Throughout the book, Fountain draws our attention to the bottom line. Our national pastime is driven by dollars. And enormous sums of money are at stake. By one estimate, spring training annually brings more than $500 million to Florida, the equivalent of two Super Bowls. Small wonder cities are prepared to vie for teams, despite sports economists’ claims that spring training has little positive impact on communities’ coffers.
What’s not up for debate is how happily fans lavish big bucks on their favorite teams. The average sale at the Red Sox team store in City of Palms, Florida, is $200. According to Fountain, the Dodgers and the White Sox chose to train in Glendale over Vero Beach and Tucson because both teams believed they’d make more money from fans there.
With details like these, Under the March Sun offers an engaging look at the contemporary and historical backdrop of spring training. Fountain’s research and insights are well matched by immensely readable prose. He beautifully captures the romance of spring training, the poignancy of its transience: “It is different in the spring, a time of hope and the suspension of care, a holiday celebration, when company’s come to call.”
Yet, oddly, no baseball lover complains when spring training is over. Because that’s when the real games begin.
Magdalena Hernandez, MBA’02, is a senior editor.
Bookmarks
Changing the Score
Arias, Prima Donnas, and the Authority of Performance, by Hilary Poriss; Oxford University Press; 2009
Astonishingly, the great sopranos once performed songs according to their likes, not their librettos.
Assistant professor of music history Hilary Poriss here offers a lively study of “aria insertion,” popular in nineteenth-century productions of Italian operas. Popular divas would shoehorn their favorite music—often by another composer entirely—into an opera. (Take that, Rossini and Bellini!)
This absorbing look back holds much to interest operagoers and scholars alike.
The Madness of March
Bonding and Betting with the Boys in Las Vegas, by Alan Jay Zaremba; University of Nebraska Press; 2009
Each spring during the first weekend of the NCAA basketball tournament, rabid fans and reckless bettors descend upon Las Vegas to enjoy a bit of legal sports betting in America.
In this account of the six days he spent on the Strip during the 2007 tourney, associate communication studies professor Alan Zaremba shares his impressions of the resulting bacchanal.
By turns hilarious and eye-opening, the book offers a fascinating glimpse of a true—and truly eccentric—sports subculture.