Your 2016 Spring-Training Trip: A Moderately Helpful Guide

Welcome to the new year. The Chinese calendar says it’s the year of the monkey, the baseball calendar says it can’t possibly be the Royals year again, but most importantly, it’s the year you’ll finally do that thing you’ve been telling yourself for a long time that you’re going to do. “I’m going to do that thing,” you say to yourself. Go you! And what is that you’re talking about? It’s hard to tell with your mouthful of Cheetos-brand corn puffs so I’ll say it for you: you’re finally going to go to spring training!

Yay! Who cares about the kids? The husband and/or wife will be there when you get back, no matter what they say, probably. As for the job? You won’t have that for long anyway. Abuse it while you can! What’s more, you have vacation days for a reason, and nobody, not some highfalutin “boss,” is going to tell you when you can use ‘em!

So this is happening, dammit. The first step is go figure out who is coming. Call up your buddies! Email ‘em. Text ‘em. Record a message on a wax cylinder and strap it to a carrier pigeon. Round ‘em up! Figure out who you can goad into joining you, because this will be important information for the next step. You may want to start with a nice email. Something like this:

Hey jerks,

Hope you’re not dead yet. I’m going to spring training and you should come with me to help defray the cost. Also, because we’re friends! We’re going to see my favorite teams because I thought of this first. Baseball is baseball though so you should be happy, but even if it wasn’t I’m not interested in your opinion. Can’t wait to go! Send me a check ASAP.

Love,
You

The point is, get in touch with your peeps. You’ll need someone with intelligence, someone with money, and someone with the ability to behave like an adult occasionally. And it would be nice if all those attributes were found in one person so as to open up more spots for your actual friends.

As for where to stay, first you have to decide if you’re going to Arizona or Florida. Each has its own advantages. In Arizona the teams’ ballparks are located closer together, making it easier to see more teams while spending less time in the car. Also, in Arizona it doesn’t rain. Another advantage to Arizona is it isn’t Florida. Seriously, have you seen that place? Gosh!

On the other hand, Florida offers a more old-timey Spring Training experience. The parks are generally older, more individualized, and harken back to baseball’s spring training past. Also, Florida has the advantage of not being Arizona. Seriously, have you seen that place? Gosh!

You can see the pickle you’re in. Maybe you want to go to the state where your favorite team will be training, to catch them on the rise, before the magic happens. Or maybe you’re a Reds fan and you would rather avoid them altogether. Alternatively, you can just go to the one closest to your house to save on costs.

Ah, costs. The very reason you have never been to spring training before. The advantage to planning all this now is you can keep costs down a bit. Dragging friends along has that benefit, too, because you can sleep two or three or four — or four and that dude from the bar — to a hotel room depending on how cheap/poor/adventurous/willing to lie to the person at the front desk you are. In fact, the more people you con/bring, the better off you might be by renting a house. The rise of the internet has brought about websites where apparently people will, for a price, loan you their house for some period of time. This inevitably includes embarrassing action photos in the hallway of that time they trampolined off the back porch, over the above-ground pool, and into the rhododendron. This, friends, is called “living large.”

Once you’ve settled on your party size (not a euphemism), you can figure out where to stay. You’re going to want to to find a place not too expensive, but not too cheap either. There are benefits and drawbacks, something you likely know if you’re married. For example, any place with bulletproof glass in the lobby is not going to cost much (benefit!), but may require you to sleep in a room with stains on the carpet and a ball of police tape in the bathroom trash (drawback). The other side is staying at a resort, something I’ve never done and would know next to nothing about. I hear they don’t have bulletproof glass (drawback) (though this could could be a benefit if you are planning on murdering someone).

Once you’ve got your traveling party planned, the destination set, and the place to stay nailed down, you’ll need to move on to other items. For instance, you will likely need to rent a car. Neither Arizona nor Florida have what we in the civilized world refer to as “adequate public transportation” which means getting to ballparks and food options in between ballparks without a car will be virtually impossible. You could decide to just stay in the room and watch baseball clips on MLB.TV in protest, but in my experience, the state legislatures of said states pay little to no attention to this, or to anything anyone actually wants. So renting a car it is, then. So rent one already. I refuse to tell you how.

As for planning your time at spring training, the goal is to jam as many games into the smallest number of days possible. Check the team’s schedules, as sometimes you can see an afternoon game and an evening game on the same day. Imagine, six hours of meaningless sporting entertainment instead of three! Six games in three days? I’ve never achieved such pure victory before, but it’s at least worth a Google search.

*****

Right now, here in the present, we’re all still focused on the free agent and trade markets. Who will sign who, who will trade for who, and on and on. It’s still cold out and dark most of the time, but the experienced spring training reveler knows this is exactly the time to strike. Spring training is coming up whether you like it or not. And you like it because it’s baseball and it’s warm and your family probably isn’t there. It’s really the best when you think about it that way, unless you like your family — in which case, sure, bring them along, go ahead and ruin everything. The point is, ruined or not, you’ll be there. And when March rolls around and your friends are still digging themselves out of a snowbank, instead of being cold and inebriated in your basement, you’ll be warmer and inebriated at some ballpark. Truly, you’ll never want to leave.

Some say spring training is stupid. What’s the point, they argue, when the games don’t mean anything? To that I say, how much does a single regular season game mean? Almost nothing, as well. Also, there’s a very real chance your favorite team will lose. At a spring training game, that doesn’t matter because the games don’t count! This is like the built-in excuse you’ve been wanting all your life to explain why you haven’t been successful. Why actually try when you might fail? Don’t even try. That way you can’t fail. It’s so much less stressful when you already know the outcome.

In the end, if you do it all right, you’ll leave sunburned, hungover, in possession of markedly less money, no larger grasp of baseball, the same number of venereal diseases, and the burning desire to replicate the experience exactly in a year’s time. If spring training teaches us anything, it’s sometimes that caring less is more.