Is Spring Training Good Or Bad (Or Ripe For An Alien Invasion?)

Danger Guerrero: As long as humans have been capable of rational thought, they have puzzled over a handful of great, perplexing questions. Where did we come from? Why are we here? And perhaps most importantly, Spring Training… good or nah?

While my colleague Martin Rickman and I are in no way qualified to answer the first two questions in that list to any degree of certainty, we are qualified to have a silly, contentious debate about the merits of Spring Training. After all, we are writers on the Internet. You could make the argument that no one is more qualified to have a silly, contentious debate like this.

Unfortunately, we are both very agreeable guys by nature, so in order to keep this debate from becoming “I think it is fine,” “Me, too,” we have chosen to flip a coin and use the result to assign a side in the debate that must be defended fully and ruthlessly.

Martin won the toss and has selected to defend Spring Training. Sir, the floor is yours.

Martin Rickman: Spring Training is good. It just is. We get sideways pictures of people who aren’t really in shape at all, guys driving ridiculous cars or even riding a horse to practice, and it’s one of those rare times where kids can see their baseball heroes up close and personal and have all kinds of fun. Some of my best sports memories as a kid were at spring training, and even if you don’t love baseball, you can still have a good time watching the players clown on each other and do ridiculous stuff. I’m perplexed you’d even think to defend the idea that spring training is bad. Without spring training, we don’t get this:

DG: Spring Training is bad. It’s just practice. Why in the world am I supposed to care about practice? I’m from Eastern Pennsylvania. I owned three different Allen Iverson jerseys in college. I have a deep opposition to practice buried somewhere inside my bones. I cannot abide this.

And even then, baseball practice is barely practice. Baseball is 95 percent standing around or sitting down at full game speed. Spring Training isn’t even that. It’s just sprawling out on the grass in the sun and calling it “stretching” followed by leaning against a batting cage until it’s your turn to take lazy whacks at batting practice meatballs. If I wanted to see millionaires loaf about in the sun, I would stow away on Leonardo DiCaprio’s rented yacht. There is literally nothing about any of this that is worth getting excited over.

MR: Sprawling out on the sand and calling it “vacation” is something people do all over the world! How is sprawling out on the grass in Florida and Arizona that much different? What makes spring training unique is that you can share that moment in close proximity to some of your heroes, and also to some guys who aren’t that different from you and me. Those guys who aren’t making the team and have no shot at it whatsoever. There’s something beautiful about that. Not only are you close to the action physically, but you’re close to the action metaphysically, as well. It’s our “baseball players, they’re just like us” moment, and these are guys who someday might sign a $200 million contract. It’s humbling and inspiring all at once.

Not to mention some of the best scenes of Major League are when they’re still in spring training. Are you someone who hates Major League?

DG: Of course I like Major League. Major League is a great movie. Do you know what else is a great movie? Independence Day. But that does not mean I want aliens to blow up the world’s largest metropolitan areas and kill Harry Connick, Jr. and Vivica A. Fox’s one stripper friend who was on Saved by the Bell: The College Years? What am I, some sort of monster?

MR: Aliens wouldn’t blow up the world if they came down and got to enjoy spring training. They’d get sun, and snacks, and something vaguely resembling baseball in a climate that is agreeable to all ages for a reasonable price. Aliens would love spring training.

DG: Yeah, until one of them says, “Wait, why does the pitcher have to hit in one league, but not the other?” and we have to explain the designated hitter to them. They’ll realize the whole human race is illogical and inferior and decide to enslave us all! “It’s for your own good,” they’ll say. And then what? We all just live in work camps smashing rocks together until we die of heat exhaustion? No thank you to THAT, I say.

MR: Until one of us grabs the hammer, and another grabs a smaller rock, and we take turns trying to hit the rock with the hammer, and would you look at that, we have baseball again. Then it’ll be spring training all over again. Spring training is hope. Spring training is the promise of a better tomorrow. Spring training is America.

DG: Okay, but we’re changing the name from “baseball” to “rockhammer.”

MR: I don’t know why they aren’t already calling baseball that. It’s way more metal.