CAMELBACK RANCH
GLENDALE, ARIZONA
I grew up a fan of the San Francisco Giants, watching occasional baseball games on cold summer nights where players fought swirling winds to catch erratic fly balls that should have been easy outs. As fog rolled in and carpeted the hillside, temperatures dropped twenty degrees or more. Die-hard fans who stayed until the end of extra-inning night games were awarded The Candlestick Cross: a pin featuring a snow-covered SF logo with the Latin phrase Veni Vidi Vixi (“I came, I saw, I survived”).
As a kid, I played baseball, watched it live and on television, and simply loved it. I still do. In today’s world of constant stimulation, where television programs have information tickers at the bottom and 30-second commercials dazzle us with a hundred edits or more, baseball is too slow for many people. It lacks the frenetic pace of basketball or the violence of football. To them, it’s no longer the National Pastime. It’s an anachronism.
In the classic film Field of Dreams, James Earl Jones said, “The one constant through all the years has been baseball. … This field, this game, is a part of our past. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again.” That’s how I see it.
As Major League Baseball implements rule changes to speed up the game and encourage more excitement and run scoring, I headed to Arizona with my wife Beth to take in a couple ball games. We arrived at Camelback Ranch stadium, the off-season home shared by the L.A. Dodgers and Chicago White Sox. The stadium is one of ten ballparks hosting fifteen MLB teams that make up the Southwest “Cactus League” which was founded in 1947. Even though it’s one of the largest Spring Training facilities, Camelback Ranch has a capacity of only 13,000, including 3,000 lawn seats. It’s an intimate setting to get reacquainted with the game.
Sometime in the 2000’s, after I’d been living in Los Angeles for more than twenty years, Beth said to me, “Don’t you think it’s time to wear blue and start rooting for the Dodgers? They’re your home team now, you know.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” I explained. But over the years, I abandoned my motto (“my two favorite teams are the Giants and whoever is playing the Dodgers”) and agreed to cheer for the Blue as long as a Dodger win didn’t impact the Giants. It made home life during baseball season easier.
So there we were, just weeks away from the 2023 season opener, ready to soak up some nice Spring weather while root root rooting for the Dodgers. A Dodgers-Giants game would have been ideal, but we settled for the next best thing: a game with cross-town rivals, the Angels.
The weather was a perfect 80 degrees and sunny, with just enough cloud cover and a light breeze to keep us from getting too warm. But it wasn’t just the weather that made the atmosphere great. There was joy in the air. There was hope.
The real season hadn’t started yet. There were no winners and losers. Not really. Every minor league player could still make it to “The Show” and every team still had the World Series in its sights. The business of baseball was there, as a dozen scouts made pitch-by-pitch notes on every player, but the joy of the game was above it all.
Fans wore hundreds of different Dodger shirts and hundreds of different Angels shirts. Nobody yelled at anyone. Nobody threw food or punches. Everyone remembered, after all, that baseball is a game. We cheered for home runs and sparkling defensive plays. We cheered for young players who may never swing a bat in front of a major league pitcher again. We cheered for ourselves when foul balls were caught by barehanded fans. We ate hot dogs and Cracker Jacks. Beyond the outfield fence, children played tag on the grass between innings and collected autographs from friendly players after the game.
We had stepped into the glorious past. Oh, there were reminders of 2023, like cell phone cameras and mango margaritas with Tajin seasoning. But unlike the modern penny that broke the illusion of the past for Christopher Reeve in Somewhere in Time, nothing could pull me from the warm nostalgia.
The following day we returned to Camelback Ranch to see the Dodgers battle the Chicago Cubs, and the joy remained. We were happy to share it with my Aunt Marnie and cousins Lisa, Jackie, and Tim. The feel-good atmosphere was not a one-day fluke; it’s alive and well in the Cactus League.
As Rodney King famously asked after the 1992 Los Angeles riots, “Can’t we all just get along?” A weekend at Spring Training baseball reminds us that the answer is yes. Yes, we can.
