PLAY BALL

The first big-league baseball team that came to Florida for spring training did so before airplanes and movies and the formation of the NHL, NFL and NBA. It was way before those sports leagues popped on the scene in the 20th century.

It was 1888. A team called the Washington Nationals traveled about 700 miles south to Jacksonville. Those 19th century Nationals have nothing to do with the 21st century Nationals who have spring training at The Ballpark of the Palm Beaches in West Palm.

Spring training 2024 is about to kick off (to mix sporting metaphors) for 15 teams in Florida. That’s half of the teams in the majors. The other 15 train in Arizona. The first Grapefruit League games will be played Feb. 24.

Those 15 teams will revive a ritual older than spring break and perhaps more wholesome.

The tradition and the past is fascinating, but for teams and their fans, spring training is more about the future than the past. It’s fun looking back but for the eight Major League Baseball teams who train in Florida Weekly’s east and west coast communities, it’s about 2024, not 1888.

Charlotte Sports Park on El Jobean Road (State Road 776) in Port Charlotte, spring training home of the Tampa Bay Rays. COURTESY PHOTO

It’s about looking ahead. …

Now

That’s the case in Palm Beach County with the Houston Astros, St. Louis Cardinals, Washington Nationals and Miami Marlins.

That’s also the case on the other side of the peninsula in Southwest Florida with the Atlanta Braves, Tampa Bay Rays, Minnesota Twins and Boston Red Sox.

It’s about some of the best teams in baseball returning to the field. No Florida based team reached the 2023 World Series, in which the Texas Rangers defeated the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Four of the eight teams in Florida Weekly communities finished first in their divisions last year.

The Atlanta Braves train in North Port’s CoolToday Park and are coming off a season in which they led the majors in wins with 104. They won the National League East for the sixth consecutive season.

Atlanta features a roster bursting with talent such as right-fielder Ronald Acuna, Jr., the 2023 National League MVP, and first baseman Matt Olson, who clubbed a team-record 54 homers.

The Braves were knocked out of the playoffs by the Philadelphia Phillies and failed to reach the World Series.

Right down the road from the Braves in Port Charlotte are the Tampa Bay Rays, who finished second in the American League East at 99-63. They were knocked out of the playoffs by the eventual World Series champion Texas Rangers, who trained in the Charlotte Sports Park from 1986 to 2002 before decamping for their current spring home, Surprise, Arizona.

The Minnesota Twins have called Fort Myers their spring home since 1991 and are defending American League Central champs.

The other first-place team is the Houston Astros, which won the American League West with a 90-72 record but lost to the Rangers in the American League Championship Series. The Astros share The Ballpark of the Palm Beaches with the Washington Nationals.

Washington is one of three teams out of this eight who finished last in their division in 2023.

The St. Louis Cardinals and the Nationals both went 71-91 last year and for the first time since 1990 St. Louis finished last. The Cardinals share Jupiter’s Roger Dean Stadium with the Marlins.

The Marlins went 84-78 last year, winning their most games since 2009, when they won 87. Miami rookie manager Skip Schumaker was named the National League Manager of the Year.

The Boston Red Sox, a Fort Myers spring training fixture since 1993, return to JetBlue Park, coming off their second successive last-place finish.

When Opening Day rolls around on March 28, all the teams will enter the season with the same record: 0-0.

An axiom in baseball holds that every team will win a third of its games and lose a third of its games and it’s what they do with the remaining third that determines their record.

The teams will start sorting out that math soon.

And then

It was a different world in many ways when the Washington Nationals ventured into Jacksonville in 1888.

National League teams included the Philadelphia Quakers, Boston Beaneaters,

Detroit Wolverines, Pittsburgh Alleghenys and Indianapolis Hoosiers.

The 1888 Nationals included a player known then as Dummy Hoy, a wildly inappropriate nickname for Billy Hoy. He was dubbed Dummy because he was deaf.

That 1888 team featured a 5-foot-6 shortstop named Shorty Fuller and a pitcher named Wild Bill Widner.

But the 1888 National who would have the most impact on baseball generally and spring training specifically was a light-hitting back-up catcher named Connie Mack, who hit .187 that year.

In the decades to come, Mack would manage the Philadelphia A’s for an improbable 50 years, from 1901 to 1950. He died at the age of 93 in 1956. He would bring the A’s to Fort Myers for spring training from 1925 to 1936 and then to West Palm Beach in 1946, where they stayed until 1962. By then, the A’s were the Kansas City A’s.

The 1888 Jacksonville experiment didn’t start an exodus of teams to Florida. Not even close. Not quite yet. It took time, e

Th A’s did not return to Jacksonville again until 1903. By 1913, the Chicago Cubs were in Tampa. In 1914, the St. Louis Browns were in St. Petersburg.

Now, spring training is a tradition even older than the NFL (founded 1920) and the NBA (founded 1946, and NHL (founded 1917). ¦

The post PLAY BALL first appeared on Charlotte County Florida Weekly .