Hope Springs Eternal

BY KEVIN KERNAN

Spring training is so close you can taste it. It tastes like a hot dog on a sun-splashed day in Florida or Arizona.

Cubs pitchers and catchers report this Super Bowl Sunday to Sloan Park in Mesa. For years, I would go to spring training early, well before the reporting dates and in the process have the entire media landscape to myself. Most of the players would be there so it was a buffet getting the spring stories well ahead of the competition.

After a few years, some other outlets finally figured it out and started sending their reporters to spring training early as well. AMBS was always a trendsetter.

Way back in March of 1962 American essayist Roger Angell, who was the proud recipient of the 2014 BBWAA Career Excellence Award, described spring training in his own unique way, and mind you, this is all part of one paragraph:

“Big-league ball on the west coast of Florida is a spring sport played by the young for the divertissement of the elderly – a sun-warmed, sleepy exhibition celebrating the juvenescence of the year and the senescence of the fans. Although Florida newspapers print the standings of the clubs in the Grapefruit League every day, none of the teams tries especially hard to win; managers are looking hopefully at their rookies and anxiously at their veteran stars, and by the seventh or eighth inning, no matter what the score, most of the regulars are back at the hotel or are driving out to join their families on the beach, their places taken by youngsters up from the minors. The spectators accept this without complaint. Their loyalty to the home club is gentle and unquestioning, and their afternoon pleasure appears scarcely affected by victory or defeat. If this attachment were deeper or more emotional, there would have been widespread distress here three years ago when the Boston Red Sox, who had trained in Sarasota for many years, transferred their spring camp to Scottsdale, Arizona, and the White Sox moved down from Tampa, but the adjustment of the new stocking color, by all accounts, was without trauma. The Beach Club Bar, out on Siesta Key, still displays photographs of Bobby Doerr and Dom DiMaggio and other fine members of the Red Sox teams of the forties, and at the ballpark I spotted a boy of ten or twelve, wearing a faded junior-size Red Sox uniform (almost surely a hand-me down from an older brother), but these are the only evidences of disaffection and memory, and the old gentlemen filing into the park before the game now wear baseball caps with the White Sox insignia above the bill.’’

Time marches on, but not always in spring training…

I have only one question: What’s a newspaper?

The Beach Club Bar is still around. To some degree, spring training still happens this way. Yes, things have changed, including how the game is played and the location of teams. And to think I only transcribed half of that Roger Angell paragraph of Chapter One of The Summer Game. The chapter is titled: The Old Folks behind Home.

You do not see writing like that anymore. And like I said, teams have changed too. The Red Sox were in Scottsdale through 1965 and then moved back to Florida to Winter Haven and stayed there through 1992 before picking up stakes and moving to Fort Myers, first at City of Palms Park, a place I thoroughly enjoyed during the great rivalry years of the Yankees and Red Sox because you had tremendous access to the players and fields – and those players loved to talk. In 2012 the Red Sox moved into their new Fort Myers home Fenway South.

Remember that youngster Roger Angell saw who was wearing the hand-me-down Red Sox uniform, he would be about 75 now. Wow.

Time marches on, but not always in spring training – and that is one of the beauties of going to spring training. I’m hoping that person is still attending spring training games and if he is in Sarasota, he will be watching the Orioles, who have been at Ed Smith Stadium since 2010. The neighborhood ballpark was built in 1989. A side note, Ed Smith Stadium, at least the last time I was there, has one of the most dangerous press boxes. You can’t be nerding-out and not paying attention to the game because some rocket foul balls came into that area.

As for the White Sox, who called Sarasota home in 1962 when Mr. Angell was there, from 1960-1997, they are now in Glendale, Arizona at Cambelback Ranch, sharing a complex and a ballpark with the mighty Dodgers.

The symmetry is perfect, the worst team in baseball alongside the best team in baseball. In one beautiful spring day you can see both ends of the spectrum.

My favorite spring training site was Yuma, Arizona and not just because the high school’s nickname is the Criminals. Yuma was home to the territorial prison. I loved the convenience of the ballpark and the access to the players when I covered the Padres before they moved to Peoria, Arizona.

The Yuma ballpark was Desert Sun Stadium and they were not kidding about the desert sun; it was aptly named. The press box was a cement structure more like a pill box than a press box, but the proximity to the field was incredible and in 1988, just as Roger Angell wrote about in 1962, the fans there were mostly a senior citizen crowd. The Padres played in that ballpark from 1970-1993 – and had a women’s fan club called the Madres. On weekends, though, the crowd would get much younger because it was only about a three-hour drive from San Diego so sunbathing was part of the weekend atmosphere.

I remember in 1988, the first time I saw future Hall of Famer Roberto Alomar in a Padres uniform, his uniform was covered with dirt and grass stains from diving for baseballs – not in the game, but during batting practice. Imagine that. Again, times have changed. Players barely break a sweat now in BP and in the spring games. Pitchers running in the outfield during games was also a Yuma staple. That’s gone. Funny how pitchers don’t run nearly as much as they did back then and the injuries are everywhere, as are the nerds.

The media and the Padres stayed in the same hotel, so interview opportunities were many but the Padres media, for the most part, knew when to give the players space. The clubhouse would open early in the morning – about 7 – and you could spend all day in there talking to players and coaches if you wanted to do that. Access across the board nowadays is limited and baseball is the poorer for it. Many coaches are off limits.

Here are a few other noteworthy spring training memories. I was lucky enough to be on a back field one day in Clearwater in 2010 when Phillies pitchers were taking PFP, Pitchers Fielding Practice, real PFP, not the lazy one-hop PFP of today.

This was on the half field, just the infield portion and I planted myself directly behind the fence at first base to observe.

The ferocity with which another future Hall of Famer Roy Halladay took PFP was stunning. He didn’t just field grounders and glide to the first base bag, he attacked the ball and attacked the base.

The fateful moment Yankees ace Gerrit Cole did not cover first base in Game 5 of the World Series last October on Mookie Betts’ spinning ground ball, I immediately thought back to that spring day and how hard Halladay worked on that back field with no one from the outside watching – except me. I’ll add, the rest of the Phillies staff, followed suit, and tried to emulate Halladay’s work ethic. That is how it’s done.

Ruben Amaro Jr. was the Phillies GM who traded for Halladay.

“Hardest working, most accountable player ever,’’ Amaro told BallNine. “Period.’’

Well said.

You can’t just turn it on in a World Series game, you have to approach every PFP with a serious approach and in Halladay’s case, with a vengeance. Over the next two seasons the Phillies ace would win 40 games, but they tell us now a starting pitcher’s won-lost record doesn’t matter.

I call BS on that. By the way, those two years Halladay pitched 484 innings, 250 innings that first season.

Only four pitchers made it to 200 innings last season in MLB, with Seattle’s Logan Gilbert leading the way – but he was still 42 innings behind Halladay’s 2010 total.

One final spring memory, and fittingly, another Hall of Famer, and this one came in a game in 2001. I was in Peoria, Arizona. We all know spring training highlights come and go but on this day I happened to see a blur of a ballplayer race from home to third with a triple on a ball in the gap. It was Ichiro Suzuki. What a sight it was and at that moment I knew Ichiro was going to be something special. Spring magic.

Turns out Ichiro went on to hit 79 triples for the Mariners, a club record, and his 3,000th hit? You guessed it, was a triple.

You go to spring training for fun, but you never know what you might see.

“Spring training is still the best time of year because for us, who grew up in the north, you go down to warm weather, the beauty of being outside when the weather is gorgeous down there and then you also have the NCAA playoffs going on, you see your baseball friends, it is always just a good time of year,’’ one longtime talent evaluator told BallNine.

It won’t be long before that evaluator packs up his car and leaves the frozen tundra for those sunny days in Florida. “It’s the hopes and dreams of a new season for everybody,’’ he added. “Whatever your team, your hope is the guys will have a great year, they will stay healthy. You’re excited to see what the young kids do in big league camp, how the prospects respond. I like to see how a kid reacts to that first time in big league camp, if he is scared or not.’’

My hope is more teams begin to understand the true value of fundamentals, and this spring training baseball gets a little bit back to being baseball. Starting with PFP.

After all, hope springs eternal.