Ferris Bueller made it stylish to skip school and go to a baseball game, but Sean Simon and his friends really do it with panache. Sean is a schoolteacher from Pennsylvania and a Phillies fan since birth. Along with his friends Bob, Tom and Brian, he has made a tradition of calling in sick to school to catch the first plane down to Florida to see opening day in Clearwater. For the last two years, this band of Phanatics has also managed to buy the season's first bucket of beer at the tiki bar — a tradition they intend to continue next year.
"Spring training is all about relaxing, getting your buckets of beer, talking with the players like Michael Jack Schmidt and good friends," Sean said between sips of Coors Light. "A favorite moment? I don't know if I have just one. I love it all. Ask me again after the eighth bucket."
Third Inning: Heading for Home
Underneath a small tent in Pirate City a soft-spoken man stood in the center of a circle of reporters, answering each question with quiet wit and the occasional requisite baseball cliché. For Pittsburgh Pirates manager Jim Tracy, spring training is more than just morning workouts and roster decisions; it's a homecoming.
"We lived in Sarasota for 13 years. One of the best parts of being back in Florida is being able to see those people that we had built relationships with again."
Long before becoming a big-league skipper, Jim was a baseball dad helping out his kids' teams while offering batting tips to 11-year-olds. His sons' baseball careers all began on the Little League fields of Sarasota, he pointed out proudly: Brian is currently a pitcher with UC-Santa Barbara; Chad was recently drafted as a catcher by the Texas Rangers after an All-American career at Pepperdine; and the youngest, Mark, is just beginning his Pepperdine career. "They were all students of the game from a very early age."
The Pirates have a long relationship with McKechnie Field, which was built in 1923 as the centerpiece of Bradenton's downtown district and has hosted the Pirates since 1969. It's a true urban stadium: The grandstands nestle up to the main thoroughfare, and foul balls are apt to carom off the hoods and windshields of passing traffic. McKechnie also features some of spring training's finest diamond delicacies: Polish sausage, turkey legs, subs, pizza, fruit smoothies and a beer counter serving Pennsylvania brews like Yuengling, Rolling Rock and Iron City Lager.
Although ballpark food might contribute to the obesity of today's youth, it sure hasn't hurt Florida's ability to churn out talented young players year after year. The state is responsible for superstars like Gary Sheffield, Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez and Jason Varitek as well as future stars. Why is Florida such a hotbed of young talent? For several reasons, says Tom Pluto, a baseball instructor with the nationally renowned IMG Baseball Academy in Bradenton who has spent the past 41 years working in a variety of levels of youth baseball. The weather, for one thing: "You can get out pretty much any time of the year and train."
More importantly, he adds, "This is a spring training state, [so] you have so many professional baseball players, who after their careers come down here to live. That experience filters down through the college and high schools all the way down through the youth leagues."
Fourth Inning: An infidel among the Yankees
The construction of Legends Field in 1996 — a replication of Yankee Stadium, complete with arched facades and identical field dimensions — marked the end of the traditional concrete-block stadiums that had exemplified Florida baseball. At over 10,000 seats, it has the highest capacity of any spring training site in Florida, and exhibition games frequently outdraw the regular season games of the home-crowd Devil Rays.
For any true baseball fan there are usually only two teams to root for: your team and whoever is playing the Yankees. Their bloated payrolls have made them the team everyone loves to hate, and the only things worse than the Yankees themselves (at least from the perspective of rival cities) are their fans. In an informal poll taken on each of Major League Baseball's internet message boards, Yankee fans were rated the worst in all of baseball (although it should be noted that the Red Sox and Mets weren't far behind).
Feeling that this phenomenon needed to be observed further, I decided it would be fun to soil the hallowed grounds of the pinstriped by showing up in Boston Red Sox regalia, just to see if New York fans really were as horrible as they'd been labeled.
Yankee fans lived up to their reputation: It was like wearing Bloods colors straight into the Crips' hood. From the moment I crossed the bridge connecting Legends Field with Raymond James Stadium, I was greeted with boos, evil glares and drunken middle fingers. Throughout the game I was barraged with sarcastic insults like "Hey buddy! The ladies' bathroom is down the walkway!" and my personal favorite, a profanity-laced insult from a chubby fan in a Yankee jersey: "You think that's funny? You think you're funny? You're a fucking asshole, dude."
