Spring Training Has No Purpose. That's The Point.
On the rare pleasures of something that exists for no good reason at all.
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I.
Roughly a century after a manager named Ned Hanlon dragged his Baltimore Orioles to Macon, Georgia, for the first “modern” spring training in baseball history, I boarded a plane to Florida to begin one of the strangest protracted assignments of my professional career. What happened was this: The Double-A affiliate of the Cleveland Indians had just built a new stadium in downtown Akron, Ohio, and as one of the youngest writers on staff of the local newspaper, it became my assignment to cover that team as if it was a big-league club, even though this was not a big-league club at all. So off to Florida I went, with instructions to fill column inches any way I could.
I suppose this was the kind of thing fledgling reporters used to do back when journalism offered something like a normal career trajectory, and back when mid-sized newspapers made enough money from classified advertising to engage in that kind of profligate spending. It was essentially spring training for my career. I don’t remember how long I was in Florida—maybe two weeks, maybe a month—but however long it was, it felt like much longer than that. This is the first thing you learn about spring training: Time appears to stand still.
Every day was basically the same. I woke up at my hotel in a small town situated midway between Orlando and Tampa—a town literally named Winter Haven—and then I spent a couple hours lounging around the pool reading Updike’s Rabbit, Run, and then I drove to the team’s headquarters or to some other nearby stadium in some other small town, where I would watch as the teams played games that meant absolutely nothing and would never be entered into any sort of official record. I drank a tremendous amount of fresh-squeezed orange juice. I lost my sunglasses at some point and nearly burned out my eyeballs in the relentless Florida sun. I went to dinner, and went back to the hotel, and then I woke up and did it again.
I interviewed many players who had absolutely no shot of ever making the big-league club, and I interviewed two players in particular who were in the nascent stages of what would become legitimate major-league careers. One of them was a first baseman named Sean Casey, who might be the most gregarious dude in modern baseball history; the other was a pitcher named Jaret Wright, a first-round draft pick and the son of a former big league pitcher, the kind of guy who appeared perpetually restless and impatient and ready to get on with the more interesting parts of his career.
I was restless and impatient, too. I had no idea what I was doing in Winter Haven, or what my purpose was. I had no aspirations to be a baseball writer; all I wanted to do was to get this Groundhog Day assignment over with and go back home. A blur of drills and meaningless exhibitions under a blistering noonday sun were unlikely to change any minds about the inherent talent of a handful of young baseball players. I wrote stories that almost no one read. I spent a good portion of every day wondering if I’d made a terrible mistake with my life, and wondering whether I should apply to graduate school. Like the players themselves, I was far too young to appreciate the true purpose of spring training, which is that it is one of those rare things in life that subsists without any real purpose at all.
II.
It is incredibly unusual these days to come across a modern sporting phenomenon as fundamentally meaningless as a spring training game. There is no reason for it to exist, at least not in its current form; there has never really been a good reason for it to exist. For decades now, if not for over a century, people have speculated on the overarching purpose of a protracted spring training in small towns in Florida and Arizona, but there are no good answers. In 1975, the legendary New Yorker baseball writer Roger Angell spent time meandering through spring training, and this is what he came back with:
