THE RITUAL OF SPRING TRAINING : For Baseball, It’s a Special Time in Special Places

So what is there to say about spring training?

That it is a proving ground for prospects and a survival test for certain veterans?

That with the emphasis on year-round training, only pitchers require five or six weeks to prepare for a season?

That it is primarily a public relations vehicle in which the media happily go along for the ride?

That like the robin and groundhog, it is now a traditional and heartening signpost on the way to warmer times?

That it is the best part of the long season for all parties, including the senior citizen sitting in the grandstand shade at Al Lang Field in St. Petersburg, Fla., and the young woman in a bikini and high heels sitting near the home team dugout at Angels Stadium in Palm Springs?

The answer, of course, is that it is all of that and more, an annual rite that welcomes back the sights and sounds of the national pastime, unencumbered by the meaning and pressure of the season.

Ray Miller, a former manager of the Minnesota Twins, once said of spring training: “Every day is like those special afternoons in summer when you go to Yankee Stadium at 2 for a game that starts at 8. The stadium is so big, so empty and so silent that you can almost hear all the sounds that aren’t there.

“I mean, you find yourself watching different things in the spring.

“Take Larry Harlow. There was a guy who never had remarkable statistics, but damned if he wasn’t the most graceful player I ever saw.”

A special time in special places. Palm Springs. West Palm Beach, Fla. Hot Springs, Ark.

Hot Springs, Ark.?

Cap Anson took 14 of his Chicago White Stockings there in 1886. Anson’s goal, wrote a reporter who accompanied the club, was to “boil out the alcoholic microbes.”

This was in the beginning, long before Nautilus, nutrition and programs dealing with substance abuse.

This, according to Dr. Harold Seymour in his authoritative book, “Baseball: The Early Years,” was when some players returned from a winter of loafing and dissipation looking like overweight aldermen.

Among the players who journeyed to Arkansas with Anson was an outfielder named Billy Sunday, who ultimately left baseball with a batting average of .248 and became an influential voice in the campaign for Prohibition.

That 1886 trip--during which the White Stockings pledged to abstain from alcohol until the season was over--is generally considered the first spring training, though the 1870 White Stockings are known to have trained briefly in New Orleans, and Boss Tweed took the New York Mutuels, a team composed of city street workers, to New Orleans in the late 1860s.

Teams traveled by railroad then, and the growth of spring training generally paralleled the spread of the rails.

New Orleans and Hot Springs, easily reached, were still popular in the new century.

In his book “Babe,” Robert Creamer wrote of Ruth: Early in 1925, he left New York for Hot Springs for his traditional prespring training-trip. He was fat. In January, he weighed 256 pounds. In Hot Springs, he played a little golf, jogged a little, took hot steam baths. But he also drank and ran around town with women and stayed up all night and ate like a hog. He was always on the go. He would take a steam bath, the hotter the better, and then without waiting for the cooling shower after the bath, would dress and rush off to a date. For the third straight year, he caught a terrible cold, sometimes called flu, sometimes called pneumonia and, feeling terrible, left for St. Petersburg, where the Yankees were training. Mineral baths aside, the workouts during those formative years of the 1860s, ‘70s and ‘80s generally involved Indian clubs, medicine balls and sliding practice. The 1878 Buffalo team traveled no farther than the downtown YMCA, which it rented on a daily basis. The 1888 Philadelphia Phillies traveled to the New Jersey resort of Cape May, where the players started each day by throwing salt water on each other, then took long walks on the beach followed by managerial lectures.

In 1888, two years after Anson had taken the White Stockings to Hot Springs, the Washington Senators became the first team to train in Florida, settling in Jacksonville, where they were housed in shacks on the outskirts of the city. If the Senators had a curfew, they broke it regularly.

Connie Mack, a young catcher with that team, later told reporters that “by the time we arrived in Jacksonville, 4 of the 14 players were reasonably sober, the rest were totally drunk. There was a fight every night, and the boys broke a lot of furniture. We played exhibitions during the day and drank most of the night.”

The trip, however, that might have convinced all clubs that there was a significant reward if they undertook the expense of leaving the snow to prepare for the season was that made by the Baltimore Orioles in 1894. The Orioles, managed by Ned Hanlon, spent eight weeks in Macon, Ga., reportedly concentrating on nothing but baseball.

Hanlon, in that spring, is said to have introduced bunting, the hit and run, and the concept of hitting to all fields. John McGraw and Willie Keeler, who later gained fame for hitting ‘em where they ain’t, were members of that team. The ’94 Orioles went on to win a pennant, opening the season with a sweep of the favored Giants in which they used the hit and run 13 times.

John Ward, the Giants’ manager, said: “It’s a new game they’re playing. It’s just not baseball.”

McGraw later became manager of the Giants and brought a military approach to conditioning, as well as a show business flair that prompted him to take the Giants throughout the country in the spring, initiating the barnstorming trips that characterized the final weeks of spring training in the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s.

Those, too, were special times in special places, and the players, executives and writers who remember traveling by rail and playing to capacity crowds in different cities as they moved North for the start of the season now bemoan that loss of pace and camaraderie.

The escalating expenses of a barnstorming trip, coupled with the growth of air travel and TV, has generally brought a clearer definition to the Cactus and Grapefruit leagues and prompted teams to remain at their training sites until the last weekend before the season.

Now, too, it is generally conceded that the players arrive with fewer microbes and calories to burn off and that only the pitchers require five or six weeks to prepare for the season.

“I go back to when I played in Brooklyn, and most guys then lived where they played,” Dodger Manager Tom Lasorda said. “I mean, guys like (Roy) Campanella, (Jackie) Robinson, (Gil) Hodges, (Johnny) Podres and (Carl) Furillo all lived in New York during the winter. (Jim) Gilliam lived in New Jersey. (Carl) Erskine lived in Indiana.

“The only place they could work out was indoors, which meant they’d have to start from scratch in spring training and then spend a week just getting rid of the blisters, shin splints and muscle soreness.

“Now most guys seem to live in warm-weather cities or have access to better gyms and equipment. They work out all winter and come to camp ready to play the exhibition games. They keep coming in better and better condition.”

Thus, Lasorda said, his main spring goal is to get the Dodgers ready mentally and fundamentally, besides preparing the pitchers, for whom there are no shortcuts.

Former Dodger Don Drysdale, a Hall of Famer, found that out in 1966, the spring of his celebrated holdout with Sandy Koufax. Neither pitcher joined the club until the final week of spring training. Drysdale struggled early and finished with a 13-16 record. He had been 23-12 the year before.

“That proved to me that a pitcher needs six weeks of spring training and no less than five,” Drysdale said by phone from his Rancho Mirage home. “Of course, we didn’t have the guaranteed contracts they do today and weren’t in a 12-month conditioning program.

“At the same time, we were always expected to go nine innings in our first start (of the season), and now that mentality has changed some, too. Now it’s something of a rarity when a guy goes nine at any time.

“I mean, when I hear pitchers say they’re happy to go six or seven innings, I don’t know what they’re talking about. Maybe they want to save themselves to get another year under their belt with all the money there is today, but it’s still a nine-inning game, and I’d think the goal would be to take some strain off the manager and bullpen.

“I always felt that when I started something, I sure as hell wanted to finish it.”

The groundwork, Drysdale said, should be laid in spring training.

“We’d go to Vero Beach expecting to have fun but knowing we’d work like mules,” he said. “Of course, Joe Becker was the pitching coach then and he trained mules during the off-season in Missouri. We’d cuss him out and he’d say, ‘You can cuss me now, but you’ll love me in August.’ ”

Now a modern motel-type facility with color TV in each of the 90 villas, two golf courses, six tennis courts, an Olympic-size swimming pool, a basketball court, game room, theater and lounge, the Dodgertown of Drysdale’s and earlier eras was a converted Navy base with Spartan barracks.

“Where’s the barbed wire and dogs?” Bobby Bragan asked when he took his first look.

A pitching prospect named Lasorda recalled sleeping in his uniform many nights. It wasn’t that he was already bleeding Dodger blue, just that he was blue from the cold, since there was no heating.

“An electrical storm blew out all our lights one night, and for about an hour and a half we all stood in the hallways, waiting for the power to come back on,” traveling secretary Billy DeLury recalled.

“Fresco Thompson (the late vice president in charge of playing personnel) was standing in the lobby by a window when he saw a bright light in one of the players’ rooms. He went up to the room and found a young player trying to read a newspaper by a fire he had built in the sink.”

Thompson once chased a curfew breaker across the roof of the barracks and spent the next day checking with the training staff to see if anyone had shown up with a sprained ankle.

He also ran through neighboring orange groves, flashlight in hand, after seeing a man and woman drive in after curfew with their lights off.

Suspecting a player, Thompson reportedly yelled, “I’ve got you,” then embarrassingly discovered that the man was a Los Angeles sports editor.

The barracks, in the years after the Dodgers took them over in 1948, were filled to capacity. The organization had as many as 28 farm clubs and 700 players. Practices went from sunup to sundown. Branch Rickey delivered nightly lectures in the lobby.

“I remember getting my first look at the meal line and wanting to go home,” Lasorda said. “It stretched from the cafeteria to the street.

“The competition then was tremendous, and there wasn’t much chance for advancement. I don’t know how many shortstops Pee Wee Reese put out of business, but it was tough cracking that lineup.

“I mean, we worked hard just to be one of the three extra players that the club could carry during the first month of the season. I had a real good spring in ’54 and was in Brooklyn on opening day when Jake Pitler, one of the coaches, told me that I shouldn’t get an apartment because I might not be around too long.

“It was difficult and discouraging but you had to keep hoping and thinking that you’d make it. I feel that I’ve been more willing to give younger guys an opportunity because of what I went through.”

In reality, there are no alternatives now. There are fewer minor leagues and fewer players. Force feeding is the name of the economic game.

So why six or seven weeks of spring training when there is seldom that previous competition for jobs, conditioning isn’t the problem it once was, and today’s spring budget, according to Angel General Manager Mike Port, runs at least $500,000, including $440 a week to each player for meals and expenses alone?

A significant factor is publicity. How else can a club get a month and a half of free newspaper space and TV time? The Dodgers are specialists at it.

They encourage spring visits by columnists and broadcasters and handle the travel arrangements. They provide a press room for writers, a darkroom for photographers and a broadcasting facility so that KABC’s Bud Furillo can do his nightly talk show from the base during the club’s stay. There is also a hotline that reporters in Southern California can phone to get information on the club’s workouts and injuries.

“There is no way I would diminish the pluses that are available to us in spring training,” Executive Vice President Fred Claire said of the public relations value. “That’s why we telecast four spring training games and broadcast all of them.

“It’s a matter of momentum going into the season, but though the PR benefit is great, it’s still secondary to the intensity and hard work that the team puts in at Vero Beach.

“I mean, if the media looked at spring training and said they no longer saw the news value in it and no longer saw a reason to cover it, we wouldn’t be thrilled, but we’d go ahead with the preparation of our team and program.”

The media have always pursued spring training. A.M. Gillam, sports editor of the Philadelphia Record in the late 1800s, offered $3 a day to executives of the Phillies and Athletics if they would wire in reports of the club’s activities.

Over the years, baseball writers have hit journalistic lows stretching for six weeks of daily stories on .230 hitters predicting .300 seasons because of their new stances, control-plagued pitchers insisting that courses in positive thinking have cured their problems, and defensively inept teams returning to fundamentals only to find later that they are still defensively inept.

Many papers have recently begun to employ a more sensible approach, covering the daily activity in shorter, notebook-type stories while employing longer pieces on trends, developments and pivotal personalities two or three times a week.

Bill Dwyre, sports editor of The Times, said he still questions the wisdom of covering six weeks of training camp but that he is compelled to do so because of the remarkable interest in baseball in Southern California and the sense that readers are hungering for it once the Super Bowl is over.

Said Dave Smith, sports editor of the Dallas Morning News: “Of all the money we spend, the money we spend covering spring training is the best spent. With everything else changing, spring training is still what it has always been, still a tradition.

“I don’t know if it’s the same in Los Angeles, but people here and in other places where it’s still cold seem to share in the idea of a team going to the warmth of Florida. It’s a totally different training camp than in any other sport, just as baseball itself is different.

“No other sport produces as much conversation, with people talking about statistics and speculating on trades and whether this kid or that kid can make it,” Smith continued. “The bottom line is that we have more intense readership of our spring stories than any others. And if we’re playing into the club’s PR program, as we probably do during the two weeks before the Super Bowl, well that’s fine, because there’s still a lot of interest out there.”

So, spring training is a reawakening, a time for hopes, dreams and memories etched as vividly as a March tan.

It is the agony of Pedro Guerrero going down for the season on get-away day in Florida and the ecstasy of Wally Joyner’s arrival in California.

It is Milwaukee General Manager Harry Dalton saying that each spring there is an “animal rebirth” of optimism “no matter how disastrous the previous year was.”

It is an insomniac and admittedly inebriated relief pitcher named Ryne Duren, in the Angels’ first spring of 1961, chipping golf balls against the window of a motel room occupied by pitching coach Marv Grissom at 6 a.m., causing the impassive Grissom to open the door and say, “Got sort of an early starting time, don’t you Ryne?”

It is Bob Lemon, on a scouting trip for the Yankees, and Harry Minor, the Mets’ West Coast scouting supervisor, and a Los Angeles baseball writer, all graduates of Long Beach Wilson High School, standing in the middle of the Pink Pony in Scottsdale, Ariz., the Cactus League’s night headquarters, singing the Wilson fight song while Billy Martin and Bill Rigney swap stories at the bar.

It is the Yankees holding a March press conference to announce that Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich have traded wives, and it is George Steinbrenner ranting about March losses.

It is a pair of baseball writers discovering Richie Allen in a Dodgertown batting cage at 6:30 on a foggy morning and wondering if they should ask Allen if he has been to bed just as Allen is wondering if he should ask the writers if they have been to bed.

It is Mike Port, when asked why the Angels have gone to Holtville, Casa Grande and now Mesa rather than continuing to spend all six weeks in Palm Springs, saying of the renowned spa: “All those groupies! It takes the players 45 minutes to get through them to their cars.”

It is Jim Lefebvre, disguised as the Green Phantom, removing the wheels from Walter O’Malley’s golf cart and painting everything in Tom Lasorda’s locker green and hanging a sign on the whirlpool that the manager has just occupied that reads: “The S.S. Lasorda.”

It is Leo Durocher, now 80, visiting the Angels’ training base in Palm Springs and recalling that when Miller Huggins was the Yankee manager “we lived in a hotel in St. Petersburg and you walked to the ballpark a mile and a half and you walked back. If you got caught riding you got fined $200. The only one who rode was Babe.”

It is Jim Palmer saying yes, spring training can be boring but when else can you work on a curveball in situations where you would normally throw a fastball and vice versa. “The best part about spring training is that you don’t have to worry about who you’re going to face in the seventh inning,” Palmer adds.

It is the 1963 Angels, forced to ride bicycles from the team’s Palm Springs hotel to the stadium and back each day, surreptitiously dumping the bikes in the hotel pool one night, and it is a rookie named Bo Belinsky, never having thrown a pitch in the big leagues, holding out and then holding a press conference by the side of a Palm Springs pool.

It is Reggie Jackson and Charlie Finley and Reggie Jackson and George Steinbrenner and Reggie Jackson and Gene Autry, and it is Rube Marquard firing his pistol at a billboard across from the window of his hotel room in Marlin, Tex., after which Marquard’s manager, John McGraw, tells the sheriff who wants to arrest Marquard: “The Giants put this town on the map, and the Giants can just as quickly wipe it off by leaving.”

It is green potatoes and green everything at the O’Malleys’ annual St. Patrick’s Day party in Dodgertown, and it is Gene Autry, in his 70s, entertaining at a team barbecue in the back of his Palm Springs hotel by singing a medley of his hits.

It is Bob Fishel, a longtime American League executive and former Yankee publicity director, saying that when Joe DiMaggio walked into the team’s Florida hotel with Marilyn Monroe on his arm, “all of those old men got out of their wheelchairs for the last time in their life.”

It is Cap Anson, ever the showman, having his White Stockings dress in short, balloon-style pants and travel to the park in carriages and. . . .