Listen closely and you’ll hear the squeak of sneakers on AstroTurf, the crack of a batter’s first hit, and the shrill sound of whistles signaling Game on! Yes, it’s that time of year again. As fall deepens, painted faces and packed stadiums abound, with sports aficionados all over the country (and world) preparing for a spectacle that is more than just entertainment. Which leads us to the following questions: What is the place of sports in our modern lives? And how should we understand it as part of our history?
In this month’s episode, Sara Levine, Multimedia Producer for Oxford University Press, sat down to discuss the evolution of our favorite pastimes with Chuck Fountain, author of The Betrayal: The 1919 World Series and the Birth of Modern Baseball, Julie Des Jardins, author of Walter Camp: Football and the Modern Man, Dr. Munro Cullum, a Clinical Neuropsychologist who specializes in the assessment of cognitive disorders, and Paul Rouse, author of Sport and Ireland: A History.
Image Credit: “Baseball” by Anne Ruthmann. CC BY NC 2.0 via Flickr.
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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 second post below.
The Cactus League, spring training baseball in Arizona, really had two beginnings. The first came in 1947, and it was a very small part of the American civil rights movement. Cleveland Indians owner Bill Veeck had been watching closely the progress of Jackie Robinson, intending to integrate his own team as soon as the Robinson story played out. Veeck had had some uncomfortable run-ins with segregation while running spring training in Florida for the minor league Milwaukee Brewers, and he felt that Arizona would be more hospitable to an integrated team. So in 1947, he took the Indians to Tucson, persuading Horace Stoneham to bring the New York Giants to Phoenix so the Indians would have someone to play exhibition games against. There were no blacks at Indians spring training in 1947; Veeck integrated the Indians in July of that year when he signed Larry Doby. When he brought Doby to spring training in 1948, he found he was only partly right about Tucson and an integrated team. The city was not exactly welcoming, just less hostile than many places in segregated Florida might have been.
The real father of the Cactus League was a Mesa rancher and hotel owner by the name of the Dwight Patterson, who brought the Cubs to Mesa and worked to grow the league to seven clubs during the 1950s and ‘60s. But in a talk I gave at the Arizona State University Cronkite School of Journalism yesterday, I skipped over Patterson and went right from Veeck to O.P.M. as the second beginning of the Cactus League.
O.P.M., as the politicians and business developers like to explain, is Other People’s Money, and it’s become the secret to spring training baseball in Florida and Arizona. In the mid 1980s, Florida had found a way to build sparkling new spring training facilities using O.P.M., instituting a tourist development or “bed tax” on hotel stays. The tax brought in millions of dollars to Florida counties and several used the windfall to build new, made-to-order, spring training complexes and lure teams from other Florida cities to theirs. Major league baseball teams, who’d always had to pretty much take what they could get from cash-strapped local governments in the smaller cities where they trained, were suddenly being given everything they asked for and more, the communities saying: “Hey, it’s not our money; the tourists are paying for this.”
Arizona didn’t have any OP.M., but when the Indians announced in 1991 that they would be leaving Arizona for Florida, and other Cactus League teams started looking hard at these new facilities in Florida, Arizona quickly figured out they’d better get some O.P.M. too. The state instituted a tax on car rentals in Maricopa County—Greater Phoenix—of $2.50 per rental contract, the money to go to the construction and maintenance of spring training facilities. The revenues helped stave off any more defections, building new facilities for the Cubs, Brewers, Mariners and Padres. But the money quickly ran out, and in 2000, Cactus League officials were able to attach a rider to a bill for a new football stadium for the Arizona Cardinals. That money, from a bed tax and an increase in the car rental tax, allowed Arizona to become the aggressor, luring six teams from Florida over the span of a dozen years. When the Cincinnati Reds move from Sarasota to join the Indians in the Phoenix suburb of Goodyear next year, the Cactus and Grapefruit leagues will be equal at 15 teams apiece.
But both Florida and Arizona have now run out of O.P.M., the revenues committed years in advance. And in this economy they don’t have any of their own.
Perhaps that’s the next book.
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.
