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Charles Fountain teaches journalism at Northeastern University.  His newest book, Under The March Sun: The Story of Spring Training chronicles the history of baseball’s annual six-week ritual and how it grew from a shoestring-budget road trip into a billion-dollar-a-year business.  This week and next Fountain will be blogging about his adventures at Spring Training for Powell’s.  With their kind permission we will be reprinting them here.  Check out the first one below.

Waiting at the airport to go from Orlando to Phoenix has summoned thoughts of spring training travel, and the differences between March baseball in Florida and Arizona.

Travel is probably the critical difference between Grapefruit and Cactus leagues. It is at the very least the difference that gets talked about with the most passion and regularity. In Arizona, twelve of the fourteen teams are located in and around Phoenix. The largest spread between any two teams training in the Valley of the Sun is the forty miles between the Angels in Tempe and the Royals and Rangers up in Surprise. Two teams, the Rockies and the Diamondbacks play down in Tucson, just over a hundred miles from the center of Phoenix and players and writers—especially the writers—grumble whenever they have to make the 90-minute to two-hour trip through the desert for a game down in Tucson. “Ease of travel” is the one phrase general managers and team officials most regularly use when talking about why they like training in Arizona.

In Florida, by contrast, 90 minutes would be a rather short bus ride; the farthest distance between teams is more than twice the ride from Phoenix to Tucson. The bus ride from Fort Lauderdale where the Orioles train, to Dunedin, home to the Blue Jays just northwest of Tampa, would be 250 miles. Not surprisingly, the Orioles and Blue Jays never take that ride; they don’t play one another in Florida. And there are many other teams whose paths hardly ever cross in Florida. With teams spread from Fort Myers to Dunedin on the Gulf Coast, from Fort Lauderdale to Viera on the Atlantic Coast, and with three more teams spread along I-4 from Lakeland to Disney, the Grapefruit League map is a map of all of the Southern Florida, and long bus rides are the bane of everybody’s existence. When the Red Sox and Twins ride up from Fort Myers to Clearwater or Dunedin, the ride begins at seven in the morning and can take more than three hours. The ride home, through Tampa Bay’s punishing rush-hour traffic, is generally even longer. When the Orioles, down in Fort Lauderdale, go anywhere except up to Jupiter to play the Cardinals or the Marlins, it’s a sunrise-to-sunset affair. “Managing travel” so as to not lose too much time to player training is how Grapefruit League GMs and team execs discuss the travel challenges of Florida.

The weather gets a lot of talk too. For most of winter-bound America, there’s not a lot of difference between the sun of Florida and the sun of Arizona, but the locals in both states like to point out how theirs is better. “They get all that rain in Florida,” say the chamber of commerce people in Arizona. “You lose a lot of games and training time to rain.”

“Players don’t sweat in Arizona,” counters one Florida person. “They don’t get in the same kind of shape because they never sweat. You look at the conditioning of teams in the early season, and you’ll see that the teams that trained in Florida seem to be in much better shape.”

But the difference that matters most these days is money. Spring training is big business now, and since the beginning of this century, Arizona has spent $250 million in public money building and improving spring training facilities for major league baseball teams. Florida has spent too, but $100 million less than Arizona has. This has led to a dramatic shift in the spring training map. Since 1998, five teams have shifted from Florida to Arizona, with a sixth, the Cincinnati Reds, scheduled to join them in 2010. When that happens the leagues will be even at 15 teams apiece for the first time.

That has a nice symmetry, but it will surely not remain that way forever. Inevitably, some team will start to see a greener patch of grass and a greener pile of money in a new community, hankering for spring training, and the map will change again. It’s not likely to happen soon in this economy; state budgets in both Florida and Arizona are in tatters. But history shows us that recessions are not forever. Baseball and spring training surely are.

Portland indie bookstore Powell’s has done a great job of using the media to tell its story, highlighting its own unique situation, but also helping readers understand some of the larger trends affecting independent online bookselling.

Today’s Los Angeles Times is running a story about the state of Michael Powell’s handover of the store to daughter Emily Powell, linking it to issues around succession in family business, and the the challenges of independent online bookselling:

“But Powell, the man closest to the action, is not celebrating. He listed some of the things that have made the store noteworthy and successful — the mix of new and used, the early Web presence, the symbiotic relationship with the city of Portland, with which he remains very involved — and concluded: ‘That has carried us well to the moment. The moment is full of trepidation and uncertainty.’”

[Now Reading: India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy by Ramachandra Guha]

John Freeman asked me to write up my impressions of the Friday night Out of the Book event; you can see an abbreviated version on the NBCC blog Critical Mass.

Friday night, June 15, McNally Robinson hosted one of many incarnations of Out of the Book. You can check out the project website for details about the other events that took place all around the country, and the project's mission and future; this is just one event coordinator's take on how our evening came together.

Ever since I realized that being a bookseller was my calling, my passion has been the various ways of creating space – for readers to discover books, for authors to present their work, and for literary conversations to take place. When Dave Weich of Powell's first sketched out for me the idea of the Out of the Book project when we were both in Portland for the ABA Winter Institute, I was on board even before I entirely understood what he was talking about. It seemed obvious to me that this project – a film about (not adapted from) a book and an author, with the potential for a larger event surrounding it, was going to be a new way of creating the space for discovery and conversation, and I wanted in on it.

When the details did fall into place, I realized that this was going to be a lot more work than the events I normally run in the store. We needed a unique venue to show the film. We needed interesting voices to talk about the book. We needed extra publicity. We needed some elements of drama to make the event special. As I've said before, the genius of the Out of the Book project is that it allows bookstores all over the country (not just in New York, L.A. or other major cities) to create an exciting and wonderful event. But seeing as how we are in New York City, it seemed our event ought to be extra special. Luckily, the elements needed were all around me, and I had a tremendous amount of help in bringing it all together.

We found two actors – one of whom works in the receiving room at the bookstore, and another who is the sibling of an employee – who were willing to create a dramatic reading or scene from the book. I first suggested to them that they use the last chapter, which consists largely of dialogue between the just-married, sexually stymied main characters. But they read the book and found a better way in: they would use the first chapter of the book, a description of the characters' state of mind as they begin their honeymoon, and speak the lines from the book as they acted out the scene. Though I was skeptical at first of whether this tack would work, it soon became clear that it was a perfect way to highlight McEwan's triumph in this novel: the limning of the disconnect between the dialogue and what is happening beneath the surface. His deft characterizations make clear to the reader, though not to the couple, exactly why their efforts at connection and communication fail, and that dramatic irony was exactly what the actors were working to capture.

After a couple of unsuccessful attempts to pin down a theater – it was April by the time I started looking, and since our events calendar in the bookstore was booked through July I could hardly expect an independent theater to have room in its schedule – Dave Weich hooked me up with a theater promoter who connected me with Two Boots Pioneer Theater in the East Village. This had been my first choice, and I was delighted that we could find a way to work with them. Graciously fitting us between their regular lineup, they tolerated and accommodated this unusual film event with only a mild degree of bewilderment about our insistence that people were going to pay money for tickets to a book event. (There were definitely moments when I shared their uncertainty, though the final count from Friday was a welcome vindication.)

Finally, the element we were most uniquely suited to host: a panel discussion. Authors, critics, experts, and other literary types are easy to find in New York; we just had to find those who were most suited to talk about this book, and who were available on relatively short notice. We were especially lucky that John Freeman agreed to moderate the panel right off the bat; as someone who has interviewed McEwan, who appeared in the film, and who knows scores of writers and publishing types, John was central to making the event a success. After some disappointments – Peter Carey was unavailable, Claire Messud and Patrick McGrath were traveling on the event date – we were able to secure the participation of a wonderfully appropriate, balanced, and richly literary set of speakers. Colum McCann, author of Zoli, is a friend of McEwan and appears in the film (as does Freeman); Kathryn Harrison, a past master of the literature of sexual intensity and anguish, added a necessary female voice to the discussion; and Doug Biro, the film's director, came on at the last minute to add his perspective as a creator of the film and a long time reader of McEwan's work.

What pleased me most about the event was how well one part of the evening flowed into another. After the audience filed in (many of them having purchased discounted copies of the book and merchandise provided by Powell's in the lobby), we began with the actors, Darrell and Jessica. Their intense small scene provided an emotional "in" to the novel, and if the "wow" I heard afterward was any indication, many in the audience shared my shaken-up response to their almost painfully intimate rendition of McEwan. Then the film opened, taking the audience through a wide-angle view of the novel, both emotional and intellectual, with many of the places named in the book beautifully filmed, and McEwan himself commenting on everything from development of the story to his thoughts on human nature and climate change. The humorous filmic epilogue, about the kerfuffle over McEwan's "theft" of pebbles from Chesil Beach and the film crew's heroic efforts to return them, lightened the mood to a more conversational one. Then the panel discussion – right there at the front of the theater – allowed another step back, to an analysis of book, film, author and project that were like witnessing a great bar conversation between extremely literate friends. John Freeman (for whom this was, I think, the third panel discussion in a week) expertly drew out the panelists' insights and kept the conversation compelling for a solid hour. (The sound recording of the discussion should be available on the Powell's website within the next couple of weeks.)

Then, just as we couldn't sit still anymore, the event was over, and we retired to a nearby bar for the afterparty. There, just as I had hoped, the conversation continued. All over the room book people were processing the experience they'd just had and the ideas it sparked on any number of topics. We had successfully created a new space that didn't exist before that night. My hope is that as the Out of the Book project continues, we will be able to do so again and again, and grow that space to the benefit of America's literary culture.

You may wonder why I tend to link many of the books I mention to their online listings off the Powell's website rather than Amazon and the like. The reason dates back to the months I spent right after graduating from college. I arrived in Portland, OR with a car full of everything I owned, no place to stay, no job prospects, and not much money of which to speak. I spent most of my days hanging out in the downtown library, but that's another story. Eventually I found shelter, food, and other staples and began to explore the city a little more thoroughly. And Powell's, sweet sweet Powell's, was one of my favorite places to go. I'd camp out in their cafe with a big old cookie and read the His Dark Materials books, one after another after another. Probably a very big factor in why I became a children's librarian later.

It is difficult to live in Portland and not love Powell's. Now my love has been paid back to me. The Powell's blog, which I check faithfully, has added me to their listing of literary bloggers. I couldn't be prouder. Thank you, you big ole beautiful bookstore. If I ever move back to the Pacific Northwest, you will be the first place I go.