Is This Rite of Spring Necessary? : Baseball: Other players might not need six weeks of preparation, but most pitchers apparently do.

How best to describe and define spring training:

--A special time of hype and hope, a signpost as traditional as the groundhog?

--A reawakening and rebirth of optimism, erasing the often bitter memories of the previous season?

--A proving ground for rookies and a survival test for certain veterans?

--A montage of snapshots, from Jimmie Reese, at 84, hitting fungoes in Palm Springs to Ramon Martinez, 21, working on a curveball under the eye of Sandy Koufax in Vero Beach?

It is all that and more, and now there is the likelihood that it will be shut down by baseball’s owners in response to a negotiating impasse with the players. That raises questions that have been asked before but seem now to carry new relevance.

Is a six-week camp necessary when most players maintain their condition over the winter?

Can the 1990 season open April 2 as scheduled if the lockout ends in early March, three weeks after the previously scheduled Feb. 15 opening of camps?

Is spring training merely a public relations vehicle in which the media happily goes along for the ride, or has the publicity value diminished now that baseball continues to make headlines most of the winter?

The answers come in different forms from different people, but the consensus seems to be:

--Although position players can prepare in two or three weeks, a starting pitcher still needs five or six to be able to go seven innings in early April.

--Although the use of spring training as an advertising and sales vehicle has changed somewhat, the five-six weeks are beneficial in building team chemistry in an era in which free agency is consistently altering rosters.

--Although players generally stay in better shape now, a greater number are playing longer and need the five-six weeks, and some always seem to be coming off surgery and need a full spring training as part of their rehabilitation.

Said Bob Rodgers, Montreal Expo manager: “You could go to camp for two weeks and have a facsimile of Opening Day, but your starting pitchers would be ready to go only three innings at most, and the slower(-preparing) players would be (at a big disadvantage). They’d have to be sent out. Some guys simply need a month (to get ready).”

Marcel Lachemann, pitching coach of the Angels, said that no matter how much throwing a pitcher does in the off-season, it takes four weeks to build to being able to pitch seven innings, and that’s after two weeks of working on fundamentals--such as covering first base--and readjusting to live hitters in batting practice.

“The minimum time is four weeks,” Lachemann said. “If you don’t have that you’re looking at your starting pitchers going five innings or less and probably having to tear up your bullpen every night and risk (physical) damage to your club.

“I really feel that anything less than six weeks is simply getting by. I mean, if we didn’t feel we needed it, we wouldn’t be there. No one goes to have a picnic. It costs the club a lot of money. But for the starting pitchers, six weeks is optimum.”

Said Bert Blyleven, 38 last year when he won 17 games with the Angels:

“Those of us who live in Southern California and pitch for the Angels or Dodgers have an advantage in that we can throw three times a week all winter, but it’s still not the same. You’re looking at a catcher’s glove instead of trying to make quality pitches to a hitter. It’s not like a game situation. There’s not the competitiveness and intensity.

“And you can run all you want during the winter, but you’re still getting your legs and body in shape during the first two weeks of spring training, readjusting mentally to fundamentals.

“Spring training may be a week to 10 days too long for the position players, but as a pitcher and older player, I feel I need that time. I like going to spring training in mid- February.”

Blyleven, then with the Cleveland Indians, was 30 in 1981 when the season was interrupted for 52 days by a player strike. He threw regularly during the strike, but clubs were given only a few days of formal preparations before play was resumed.

“I tried to do too much too soon, and tore a muscle in my elbow,” he said. “It was diagnosed as a strain and I continued to pitch with it, but I eventually needed surgery.”

Blyleven appeared in only 28 games in 1982 and ’83.

“I really feel that the strike (and the limited time to come back from it) cost me two years of consistent pitching,” he said.

Don Drysdale, the Dodger Hall of Famer, went through a comparable experience in 1966 when he and Koufax conducted a contract holdout. Neither pitcher joined the club until the final week of spring training. Drysdale, 23-12 the year before, struggled early and finished 13-16. “That proved to me that a pitcher needs six weeks of spring training and no less than five,” he said. “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.”

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.’ ”

Times have changed since 1966, and certainly since 1886, when Cap Anson took 14 Chicago White Stockings to Hot Springs, Ark., to “boil out the alcoholic microbes,” according to a reporter who accompanied the team.

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

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 remained popular far into 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 pre spring 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.”

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, living in shacks on the outskirts of Jacksonville. If the Senators had a curfew, they broke it regularly.

Connie Mack, a young catcher with that team, later told reporters: “By the time we arrived in Jacksonville, four 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.”

Now clubs respond to alcoholic microbes by putting the player in a substance-abuse program. And most players have fewer microbes and calories to burn off in February.

“I go back to when I played in Brooklyn, and most guys then lived where they played,” Dodger Manager Tom Lasorda said. “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, but I still feel the pitchers need six weeks and the team does, too.

“We’re building up a spirit, a togetherness, a feeling we can finish first. We’re working physically, mentally and fundamentally.”

This year, with Kirk Gibson and Kal Daniels coming off surgery, with a new right fielder-third baseman in Hubie Brooks and a new center fielder in Juan Samuel, spring training seemed to be particularly important to the Dodgers, but the only players expected in camp Feb. 16 are about 50 minor leaguers.

Executive Vice President Fred Claire, looking back to a time when spring training was used to cultivate headlines and season-ticket sales, said that spring training is still an important public relations tool for the Dodgers, but that is secondary to what the team tries to accomplish on the field.

“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,” Claire said.

“We need those six weeks to look at the players we have in rehab and develop a composition. And no matter how sophisticated training has become, there’s no shortcut for getting a pitcher’s arm in shape.”

With expansion having diluted talent, there is seldom the competition for major league jobs that kept a pitcher named Lasorda returning to the Dodgers’ triple-A farm club at Montreal each spring. And seldom does a prospect arrive unannounced anymore.

In the years immediately after the Dodgers took over the Vero Beach Navy base in 1948, the barracks 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. We worked hard just to be one of the three extra players that the club could carry during the first month of the season.”

Now, most organizations have only five or six farm clubs, all of which may emerge from their comparative anonymity during this spring of the anticipated lockout.

The Major League Players Assn. has already cautioned its members against team workouts during the lockout because of insurance risks, and executive director Don Fehr said that he would recommend that the start of the season be delayed if the lockout goes beyond the first week of March because of the risk of injury to players rushing to get ready.

Tim Raines, the Montreal center fielder, may laugh at that, and the suggestion that six weeks of spring training are mandatory. Raines did not rejoin the Expos until May 2 of 1987 because of free-agent restrictions. He was prohibited from going to camp with the team and worked out with his former high school baseball team and a women’s aerobic class.

In his first game, against the New York Mets, Raines hit a grand slam his first at-bat and went four for five. He hit .330 for the season.

“Yeah,” said Lasorda, “but Tim Raines doesn’t have to pitch.”