For Spring Training Fans, Arizona’s Cactus League Tops Florida’s Grapefruit League
Image credit: Sebastian Walcott (Photo by Bill Mitchell)
Long before I got to go to spring training for my job, I went to spring training as a fan. And as a fan who grew up in Georgia, spring training meant a trip down to Florida.
I think I’d been to the Grapefruit League for spring training six or seven times before I made my first trip to Phoenix to see what the Cactus League was like. And the minute I did, I wish I had discovered it earlier.
Spring training is just better in Arizona.
Now, I know there are reasons to choose to head to spring training in Florida. If you are a fan of a particular team and you want to go see your favorite players get ready for the season, that makes sense. Want to see your Red Sox, Cardinals or Mets? Congratulations, I hope you have a great time.
Or, if you want to plan a trip to the beach in March and catch a game while you’re there, Florida is the choice. You’ll get plenty of sand and sun, but no ocean in Arizona.
Still, I think the Cactus League is better. Here’s why.
Central Location Vs. A Wide Spread
If you read Baseball America, I’m going to assume that your spring training trips are a little more baseball-focused than most. You want to see a number of games. You want to see a number of teams. You want to see a number of top prospects.
If that’s the case, there’s no comparison between the two spring training states.
For starters, there’s just a dramatic difference between a spring training scenario in which 15 teams are based in one city and one that has 15 teams spread around a state.
In Arizona, your next baseball game is just a quick jaunt down the freeway. In Florida, you are making travel decisions and compromises from the moment you arrive until the day you leave.
In Florida, everything starts with where you decide to make your home base. You can focus on the Tampa-area teams (Clearwater, Dunedin and Tampa). You can spend your time with the Charlotte/North Port/Bradenton/Sarasota squads. You can go further down to Fort Myers for the Twins and Red Sox (and higher hotel prices).
You can even make the unusual choice to head to Lakeland, as the Tigers exist on their own in the middle of the State.
And then you have the East Coast, where you can see the Mets, Nationals, Astros, Cardinals and Marlins.
If you want to string together a trip to see more than one of those pods, you need to spend a good bit of time in a car. You probably need to pick up and move to a new hotel multiple times during your trip, too.
Limited Options
Those longer travel times also affect who you are going to get to see. If you’re seeing an East Coast-based MLB team play on the Gulf Coast of Florida (or vice versa), know that you’re going to see a large number of rookies, minor leaguers and non-roster invitees. Veterans don’t make those trips.
Why don’t they? Because those aren’t easy drives. The next person who tells me they enjoyed the jaunt across Alligator Alley will be the first. Even the drive across the bridges from Tampa to St. Petersburg and then the Skyway Bridge to Port Charlotte/North Port/Bradenton are time-consuming hauls.
The geography also affects how many times you’ll see the same teams play. If you watch spring training baseball on Florida’s Atlantic Coast, expect to see a lot of the same matchups. Each team in that pod plays all but two or three of their home games against the other four East Coast teams. And, as I just said above, in the rare cases of seeing a non-East Coast team, you’re mostly seeing rookies and backups. If the Yankees are making their one two-game trip of the spring to the East Coast, you aren’t seeing veteran stars. Aaron Judge, Max Fried, Cody Bellinger, Jazz Chisholm and Austin Wells didn’t make that trip. When the Red Sox went east for two games, Jarren Duran, Alex Bregman, Rafael Devers, Trevor Story, Garrett Crochet and Tanner Houck stayed home.
Those problems don’t exist in Arizona. You can pick out a spot to stay on the west side of Phoenix and have a variety of parks within a short drive. You can stay on the east side and do the same.
But ideally, you pick a spot anywhere in the middle of the city (south of the airport is my normal choice) and you can be within a 45-minute drive of any of the ballparks.
And because the teams are so close together, everyone plays almost everyone else. Even teams that share the same spring training facility rarely play each other more than three or four times all spring.
Want to see two games in one day? It’s doable almost every day in Arizona, and you can do it without a whole lot of driving. You can even get more creative. During my trip, I was able to regularly catch multiple MiLB games on the back fields, head over to a MLB stadium for a second game and then end up at a third park for a nightcap.
To do something like that in Florida requires plenty of scheduling luck and a better-than-normal day for traffic. What is easy in Arizona becomes extremely hard in Florida.
There’s no such thing as a bad spring training trip if you love baseball, but the best trips involve bouncing around Phoenix.
