No complaints: A Trip to Spring Training

My first visit in a decade had me recalling the years when the Orioles wandered around Florida without a place to call home and I was traipsing after them.

Suddenly, it just made sense.

I had a free companion ticket on Southwest Airlines that was about to expire, which meant I had to figure out somewhere to go in late February — and preferably, it would be somewhere warm as this year’s colder-than-usual winter lingered in Baltimore. And considering all that, when one possesses, as I surely do, a condition best described as “baseball on the brain,” there really is only one option.

Spring. Training.

Yup, it just made sense, so I booked a trip to Sarasota, Florida, where the Orioles have spent their springs since 2010. My wife and I flew down and were on hand for the Grapefruit League opener last weekend.

The Orioles lost to the Pittsburgh Pirates, but it was a day to cherish sensory pleasures, not analyze performances. A sellout crowd at Ed Smith Stadium basked in sunny warmth. Loud cracks of the bat drew appreciative ooohs. Yes, Chuck Thompson, the beer was cold.

What a great place to be.

It was a testament to my wife’s enduring good nature that she agreed with my thinking. When I wrote columns for the Baltimore Sun back in the day, I jetted off to spring training for a couple of weeks every year, leaving her alone with the kids in the gray chill of late-winter Maryland. More than occasionally, a blizzard hit, burying them in the house for days while I cruised around Florida in an expense-account convertible, grumbling about the wind picking up in the evenings. It’s a mild miracle that all these years later she doesn’t reflexively loathe spring training, but instead, actually likes it. (Full disclosure, her case of “baseball on the brain” isn’t as severe as mine, but she’s got it. And another disclosure: the newspaper was far too cheap to pay for a convertible, so I think I invented that memory. But it’s a good one.)

My annual spring trips shortened when an editor suggested that nothing really important ever happens at spring training, which, of course, is totally true. (But such gall to bring it up!) Then the visits ceased altogether when I left the Sun in 2007. My wife and I hadn’t visited Sarasota in a decade (I was off writing football), but I’d done it for so long that returning last week inevitably conjured memories.

To be clear, there’s a huge difference between the Orioles’ current spring situation and what I experienced back in the day. With Ed Smith Stadium established as a lovely and welcoming base for the club and its fans since 2010, Sarasota has become a Birdland travel staple. The airport, restaurants and beaches are full of people sporting the orange and black, to the point that it’s almost disappointing not to run into someone from back home. But when I covered spring training from the late ‘80s through the early 2000s, the Orioles weren’t established in any Florida locale. They bounced around the state, all but homeless, enticing far fewer fans, or it seems compared to 2025.

Actually, the Orioles had an established spring home for three decades starting in 1959. They were in Miami, practicing and playing at what was eventually known as Bobby Maduro Miami Stadium. (Maduro was a Cuban baseball entrepreneur.) Located near downtown, it had a distinctive, cantilevered roof and a full-size practice infield behind the stands on the third-base side.

It isn’t an exaggeration to suggest the Orioles’ great success in those years traced in no small part to the many hours of infield practice they clocked on “the little field” with Earl Weaver and Cal Ripken Senior watching every move and demanding fundamental excellence.

The neighborhood around the ballpark declined, though, and by the time I became a regular part of the media scrum following the team in the mid-to-late ‘80s, the old ballpark paled next to newer spring sites popping up elsewhere in Florida and Arizona. The Orioles pulled out after the 1990 season, beginning their years of wandering in the desert, er, the Grapefruit League.

In 1991, the Associated Press reported that the Orioles would “spend the first two weeks of spring training practicing at Twin Lakes Park in Sarasota and then will play their home exhibition games at various parks on Florida’s west coast … many in Bradenton, at the spring home of the Pittsburgh Pirates, when the Pirates are away, and also in Sarasota, which opened a new park for the Chicago White Sox three years ago.”

Got all that? Your Baltimore Orioles basically were sleeping on the couch in the homes of other teams.

After that didn’t satisfy anyone, they spent a few years practicing at Huggins-Stengel Field, located in a quiet park outside downtown St. Petersburg, and played their home games a few miles away at Al Lang Stadium. Huggins-Stengel had been constructed for the New York Yankees in 1925, so it literally dated back to when Babe Ruth was clubbing homers and making the most of the local nightlife. I half expected to see the famed Sultan of Swat come tottering out of the grove of trees beyond the outfield with a bat in one hand and a beer in the other. Al Lang Field was a newcomer by comparison, built in 1947.

It was ironic, to say the least. This was in the early ‘90s. Back in Baltimore, the Orioles now played at Oriole Park at Camden Yards, the game’s newest jewel of a ballpark, drawing sellout crowds every night. But in the spring, they resided in the baseball version of a dimly-lit motel room. When veteran pitcher Rick Sutcliffe joined the club, he glanced around Huggins-Stengel Field’s cramped clubhouse and said he thought he was back in high school.

Finally, in 1996, the Orioles moved back across the state to Fort Lauderdale Stadium, another Yankee hand-me-down. The Bronx Bombers had recently vacated for nicer digs in Tampa. Every few minutes, planes took off and landed at a private airfield beyond the outfield. You had to hope the pilots knew what they were doing.

The Orioles slogged away there every spring until they struck a deal to move to Sarasota in 2010 and debuted in renovated Ed Smith Stadium the next year.

And now, the stands are packed and all is well.

Sitting there last weekend, I couldn’t help recalling some of my most vivid memories from all those years of following the wandering Orioles.

One year in St. Petersburg, the newspaper rented an apartment for the writers in a modest complex where some players also were staying. One night, I came across pitcher Jamie Moyer kneeling on the parking lot and smiling as he tossed whiffle balls to his young son. He was 30 at the time, seemingly an average soft-tossing rotation piece. No one could have imagined that he’d pitch until he was 47, amassing 269 career wins before he stopped.

At Huggins-Stengel Field in 1995, manager Phil Regan, new to the Orioles, began camp by seeking to install the defensive best practices he preferred. He was immediately overruled by the team’s veterans, who basically told the manager sorry, they’d be sticking with what they’d used before.

Regan, a good and well-intentioned baseball man, hadn’t even managed a game in Baltimore yet, and already, his days seemed numbered. (They were. He lasted one season.)

One year, my wife and then-year-old daughter came with me (escaping the annual blizzard) and attended several games. It was the start of something lasting. In 2024, my daughter, now all grown up and a mother herself, got to February in Baltimore, felt a resonant stirring and traveled with her husband and two young children to, yes, Sarasota, where they took in a couple of Oriole games and returned home with an armload of Birdgear. I took it as firm validation that we’d raised her right.

Watching the game last weekend, I couldn’t help noticing the recurrences of spring’s eternal storylines. There were the Exciting New Things. (Mike Mussina and Ben McDonald back in my day; Jackson Holliday, Heston Kjerstad and others now.) There was the Veteran Ballast Acquisition. (Sutcliffe among others back in my day; Charlie Morton this year; Corbin Burnes last year, Kyle Gibson the year before.) There was the High-Priced Signing Settling In. (Rafael Palmeiro, Roberto Alomar and others back in my day; Tyler O’Neill this year.) There was the Guy with an Explanation for What Went Wrong Last Year. (Too many to mention.)

It all confirmed that, while baseball surely changes (pitch clock, ghost runner, etc.), it also doesn’t change in some ways. No matter where the Orioles held their spring games years ago, the sun was always warm and the sounds of the game were always especially sweet at the end of a long winter. A trip to spring training will always bring those joys of February and the giddy promise of a new season growing near. I’m already thinking we’ll go back next year.