Goin' south

There's no longer an excitement about spring training

We have cleverly worked it out so that we get a chance to start over again three times a year. Jan. 1, formally. Then in the spring, when nature gives us rebirth, and finally around Labor Day when our vacations end and the kids go back to school. Actually, though, there used to be a fourth time when Americans experienced a new beginning. That time was right about now, when spring training starts.

I would submit that the end of baseball's athletic hegemony in America was occasioned as much by the shift in population as anything else. Back before air conditioning, when most people still lived gamely up north, midst the snow and the brrr, the first reports of pitchers and catchers unwinding in the Grapefruit League made for a glorious augury. You see, in many respects, the promise of baseball meant as much as the actual games played later on.

But now, when anybody can jet down to the Caribbean for a long weekend, when the whole of America has tilted south, when palm trees aren't exotic anymore, baseball itself has lost much of its mystique. Baseball was never just a game. It's not insignificant that it was called our National Pastime -- not our National Sport. When baseball ruled the roost, very few people actually ever saw a major league game. It was quite sufficient and maybe even better to just imagine baseball. It's easy to visualize, after all. Unlike the back-and-forth games, baseball players don't dart off this way or that. No, there's a reliability to baseball that makes it comforting. If you heard that a shortstop went deep into the hole to snare a hard grounder, you could see it all, accurately, in your mind's eye.

And all of the dreaming started with spring training.

Of course, it helped then that nothing else was going on in February. Now you've got a half-dozen basketball games on television every day. Good grief, people are talking about high school basketball players. There are multitudinous hockey games. The Daytona 500 is bigger than the Grapefruit League. Heavens to Betsy! People talk more about the Westminster dog show than about pitchers and catchers getting the kinks out.

When baseball was all there was, February was a time of looking ahead. Now February has its own stuff. There are too many immediate distractions for us ever to look ahead in sports any more.

The greater irony, too, is that more and more baseball players come from the south. Everybody talks about the Hispanic influence, but that might miss the larger reality. Increasingly, the American-born players are the ones who are from our subtropical climates. They have the advantage of playing baseball longer each year. The boys up north look for sports that are not so limited by the weather. When players are drafted, notice where they come from. The vast preponderance are from the Sun Belt.

It used to be that baseball was centered in the north and went south every winter only to renew itself in our hopes and dreams. Now baseball really doesn't go anywhere. The players are at home down south, and spring training is just a preseason, like they have in other sports. That's the main reason baseball's not a pastime anymore. February used to be a journey we could set off on. Now, like all the other months, February's just another destination.

Sports Illustrated senior contributing writer Frank Deford is a regular contributor to SI.com and appears each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. He is a longtime correspondent for HBO's Real Sports and his new novel, An American Summer (Sourcebooks Trade), is available now at bookstores everywhere.

 

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