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"My name is Maury Allen and
I just LOVE baseball in the spring.There's just no beating
springtime in the sun
of TheColumnists.com
Man's Greatest Invention?
Some guys push for the wheel. Lots stick up for fire, though
that was probably not invented. The kids today would campaign
for something called an Ipod, an instrument about which I know
nothing.
I do know about baseball spring training.
They invented it around the turn of the last century, 1900 or
so, when a bunch of baseball teams decided it would be an advantage
to soak up some Florida sun while getting their arms and legs
in shape for the new season.
Baseball has always had a muddled beginning with a slick promoter
giving credit to a Civil War general named Abner Doubleday and
a town called Cooperstown in upstate New York making the most
frequent claims.
Hoboken, New Jersey built a statue to the game’s founding
and former big league pitcher and big league author Jim Bouton
put in his bid a few years back for his new residence in Pittsfield,
Massachusetts.
I sat at a banquet in Washington, D.C. in 1969 as baseball executives
bragged about the game’s 100th birthday. No one believed
it. I personally remembered the night because President Richard
Nixon admitted he would have rather been a sportswriter and when
introduced to him in the receiving line I blurted out, “I
wish you had become a sportswriter.”
Spring training is where young baseball players go to impress
and older ones go to hang on. Everyone is a star in spring training
and nobody ever gets cut from a team until at least three or
four weeks have gone by.
For baseball writers, the ultimate goal of any sports-minded
journalist, spring training is too good to be true.
You get four or five or six weeks of sunshine on the cuff. How
could anything beat it?
In the days before there were warm weather teams in California,
Arizona, Florida, Georgia and Texas, baseball writers from the
north would escape the blizzards and the wind chills in the zero
range with a spring training stay and accept bitter jealousies
from their colleagues up north, stuck in court rooms, picket
lines or factories.
The first photos would arrive on the desks of editors, this player
throwing a ball on the beach, that one sitting by the hotel swimming
pool, another one carousing around a beach gazebo with lovelies
lined up for his autograph.
Now, of course, the first photos from spring training show steroid-addled
players meeting with their lawyers.
In the old days, the baseball writers lived the same glamorous
life save for the lovelies. What pretty girl wants to hang out
in March with a balding, middle aged sportswriter? No matter.
The expense accounts were liberal, the sun was shining, the hotels
were pleasant and the rented cars went everywhere.
I remember my first spring training almost 50y years ago in 1959
when I traveled to St. Petersburg, Florida for the Yankees training
camp by overnight train. Casey Stengel was the Yankee manager
then and when I sat on the dugout bench with him for the first
time, a television reporter and cameraman walked up for a scheduled
interview with the Old Professor.
“Don’t you see I’m talking to my writers?”
Stengel bellowed to the TV types. Of course I was the only writer
there.
My favorite spring training came about just three years later
when the Mets were created and Stengel had moved over from the
haughty Yankees to the hungry Mets. Stengel had been fired by
the Yankees a year earlier.
“I’ll never make the mistake of being 70 again,”
he said, in explaining his severance package from the Yankees.
Stengel created the Mets image all by himself, looking always
for the light line, rather than the critical one about a new
team that would go on to set a record for frustration with 120
losses.
My favorite Stengelism for that spring occurred when he described
his new outfield of Gus Bell, in right, a father of eight; Richie
Ashburn, in center, a father of six, and Frank Thomas, in left,
a father of six.
“If my outfield produces as well on the field,” Stengel
said, “as well as it does off the field, we’ll win
the pennant.”
There is never a tense day in spring training for a baseball
writer because none of the games count. Maybe George Steinbrenner
thinks they do but not really.
Once the season begins and the games count, that sweet, friendly,
pleasing player of March turns into the growling, nasty, antagonistic
guy in April.
That all figures because the baseball writers are no longer in
the shade of the Florida palm trees or the warmth of the Arizona
sun. Now they are in Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and Kansas City.
Have you ever spent a weekend in Pittsburgh, Cincinnati or Kansas
City? It could be enough to make you give up baseball writing.
©2008 by Maury Allen. The Maury Allen caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The illustration is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This column first posted Feb. 25, 2008.
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