Spring Training

Sports arenas are microcosms, little moral universes where the rules are exceptionally clear and the consequences--winning, losing--unambiguous. Perhaps it is that simplified, stripped-down quality that has attracted me over the years to spring training, professional baseball's annual six weeks ritual of rejuvenation. It is a sign of spring: the news photos of fit, agile young men, tossing baseballs under blue skies across the deep-green grass. The new faces, rookies and recent draft picks, the eternally reawakened hopes of making the team--it all has the lustre of renewal, a secular sort of Easter, a promise of things to come.

Spring training is always optimistic. Every team, it seems, could be a contender; for every young player this could be the year. And it is mostly high-spirited: there is time for card games in the clubhouse, golf on the off days, and the whole experience is routinely referred to as "camp." Camp for young adult millionaires.

And every year there are stories--endless stories. When I was little, I read deeply in the genre of sports fiction. A lot of the drama unfolded at training camps--and it happens in real life too. Last spring the big Red Sox story was how no one was replacing traded pitching ace Jon Lester because all the pitchers were aces. (It wasn't true--they bombed.) This spring it was about veterans and newcomers: last year's rookie surprise, Travis Shaw, has apparently seized third base from the once acclaimed (and overpaid) veteran Pablo ('Panda') Sandoval, while it seems touted newcomer Rumney Castillo can't hit fastballs (they pitched slower in Cuba, where he made his name), and is headed for bench-warmer's limbo. Ageing star Allen Craig failed to make the comeback in exhibition season that would keep him in the game, while last spring's injured rookie, catcher Christian Vazquez, has bounced back from surgery and should be in the swing by mid-season. You could find half a dozen sports novel plots just in the Red Sox camp this season.

Unfortunately for me, the pleasure of pro baseball has for some time been compromised by the dollar signs stuck all over it. Soon the real season will start, with hundred-dollar seats at Fenway Park, cable-only broadcasts, and sports stories that talk endlessly about free agency and contract options, how much David Price gets paid per pitch or David Ortiz per swing. Championships become commodities, and team-building an exercise in venture capital. Even the spring training competitions like Shaw vs. Sandoval is framed in terms of use value vs. exchange value. The long arm of financialization has reached into baseball's pockets--bringing along its nerdy cousin, Big Data or sabermetrics--and the joy of the game is now heavily mediated by this nexus of statistical and financial calculation.

Still, for six weeks in late winter, as the last snows melt away in Massachusetts, the new crop of players pops up in Fort Meyers like crocuses: new faces, new hopes. It's camp. Players are loosening up, getting ready to play the game. If you squint and block out all the scouts, executives, and middle managers, it could look like the vanished sandlot of my youth. It could look like a bunch of ball players, having fun.