The Grapefruit League

I.
I was not much of a baseball player in my youth.

I played first base on an Atom League softball team that won the Goleta Valley Parks and Recreation championship, my first sports trophy. We did not wear uniforms, just an older pair of blue jeans and the team sponsor’s
t-shirt promoting a Union 76 gas station.

When things escalated to hardball, scratchy uniforms and expensive cleats, my Little League coach put me in right field for the last inning of most games, which meant I rarely had an at-bat. Which was good news. I rarely struck out because I never faced any pitching.

Like the smaller, young-for-my-grade, less athletic kids in the neighborhood, I took up surfing and said goodbye to my bat and glove. As W.H. Auden wrote of Icarus’ doomed flight, baseball was an “important failure.”

II.
I like to write about baseball.

In my 2024 short story collection The Avocado Wars, there’s a story titled “Mays, Marichal and McCovey,” capturing the influence of the mid 1960’s San Francisco Giants had on my childhood, even though we only lived 90 miles from Chavez Ravine and 325 miles away from Candlestick Park.

I recently wrote a short story, “The Fluke,” about a minor league baseball pitcher who lasts but one year in Single A ball, but it provides life lessons for adulthood.

I’ve written several baseball poems including “Dodgers v. Giants 1965” and “The Gloves,” written about the Double Play bar in San Francisco, published in the literary journal Cobalt, in the Earl Weaver baseball edition.

III.
I’m thinking today about the Grapefruit League spring training games I used to go to with John Miller every March, with an $18 field seat along the first base line, sitting right with the major league scouts and their stopwatches and radar guns, on warm 75 degree days, watching the Devil Rays at Al Lang in St. Petersburg, the Blue Jays up in Dunedin, the Phillies in Clearwater, and of course, the Pittsburgh Pirates in downtown Bradenton.

Spring training baseball is far more relaxed than a major league game. A pitcher will only throw for three innings. The managers and batting coaches sit in camp chairs on the grass outside the dugout, oblivious to the foul balls that might bean them. Players not in that day’s lineup run wind sprints and stretch on the warning track, and the game proceeds around them.

IV.
To watch the Pittsburgh Pirates play spring training baseball in Brandenton, you get to cross the Sunshine Skyway bridge, southbound on I-275, an impressive feat of transportation engineering.

Grapefruit League games are played all over central Florida (Orlando, Tampa, Clearwater), each day at 1 pm. You can sleep in, have a late breakfast, and leave for the park about the time you’d normally be eating lunch at work.

These are not giant MLB stadiums, like Camden Yards or Wrigley Field, but more like the minor league parks you’d find in Greensboro, Roanoke and Kannapolis.

Parking is easy, and entertaining. In Bradenton, you can try the Manatee Auto Body shop lot for six bucks, or park on the grass behind the Boys and Girls Club. If you park in the Marine Corps League lot, it will set you back seven bucks, but they’ll give you a hot dog, wrapped in foil.

V.
McKechnie Field, as I knew it in the early 2000’s, was not a ballpark located in the sticks or in beige suburbs resembling a water park, or tony and shiny, squeezed like a stranded base runner into some downtown, mixed-use development to leverage the HUD money.

McKechnie is storefront; the entrance gates flush right at the edge of the sidewalk. On the same block, you can get your tires rotated or your taxes done. A foul ball to right lands on a family-style restaurant, like something out of stickball.

VI.
Our ritual has nothing to do with spring renewal, consuming grilled meat, the hanging curveball, or the 30 day-chrysalis of the Grapefruit League.

It’s something else altogether. How about this? Today is Wednesday and everything around me in Bradenton (Manatee County seat) is named after a manatee.

Ask the driver of the Astros’ team bus. This place here is just like the place where he grew up.

He’s standing in the warm sun on the sidewalk next to his bus. And even he knows, by all the sounds along the street, that the pitcher inside the park, the rookie, is done for the day.