Baseball season and Valentine’s Day are for lovers

How lovely is this? Major League Baseball’s pitchers and catchers begin reporting for spring training in Florida on Valentine’s Day – Tuesday, Feb. 14. 

It’s an event that baseball fans around the world live for…the dawn of a new season. Everybody begins with a blank slate. Hope springs eternal. 

The origin of Florida’s spring training Grapefruit League dates back to 1888. The first professional baseball team to transport its players to Florida for pre-season workouts was the Washington Nationals, who spent three weeks in Jacksonville to prepare for the 1888 regular season. A lot of good it did.

 

The Nationals posted a 48-86 record and finished 37½ games out of first place that year. That dismal performance convinced Washington…and all other teams that traveling south wasn’t worth the expense. 

Try, try again. In 1913, Tampa Mayor D.B. McKay lured the Chicago Cubs to set up a spring training base in Tampa by promising to cover the team’s expenses. McKay viewed it as an investment in an emerging tourism opportunity. 

About the same time, St. Petersburg Mayor Al Lang recruited the St. Louis Browns to come to his city. In 1914, the St. Louis Cardinals found a spring training home in St. Augustine, while the Philadelphia Athletics set up camp in Jacksonville. 

The assembly of spring training sites took on the persona of the Grapefruit League in 1915, after a brash, young outfielder with the Brooklyn Dodgers and his team manager cooked up a publicity stunt to attract fans to the Dodgers’ Daytona Beach spring training site. 

The player was Charles Dillon “Casey” Stengel, and the Dodgers’ manager was Wilbert “Uncle Robbie” Robinson. They had heard about a dare devil female aviator who was dropping golf balls out of her airplane to promote Daytona Beach golf courses.

 

If Ruth Bancroft Law were to drop a baseball from 500 feet above the Dodgers’ practice field, could Robinson catch it in a big old catcher’s mitt? Stengel bet he couldn’t. 

On the designated flight, Law threw ‘em a “curve ball,” so to speak, dropping a grapefruit instead of a baseball. Robinson had no clue; he was focused on snagging the speeding sphere (traveling at about 95 miles per hour). He did…sort of. The grapefruit “exploded” when it smacked into his leather glove.

 

Writing for the Society for American Baseball Research, Joe Guzzardi said: “Onlookers recalled that the Dodgers manager, now felled and covered in sticky red juices, thought he was mortally wounded. A dazed Robbie called out ‘Help me, lads, I’m covered with my own blood.’” 

“Only when the Dodgers rushed over to Robinson’s side, but burst out laughing hysterically, did the manager realize that he had been the target of a friendly joke gone bad,” Guzzardi wrote. 

One sports historian suggested that Ruth Law made the switch because she thought the softer grapefruit was “less likely to kill the man if he misjudged the ball and got plunked on the noggin.” 

Robinson asserted: “I’d have caught that ball (grapefruit) if there hadn’t been a cloudburst just when I got my hands on it.” 

Stengel reportedly quipped that his manager “couldn’t cut it in the Grapefruit League.” 

Local sportswriters took it from there. The Grapefruit League became an institution.

 

Baseball Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby came up with the Cardinals in 1915 as a teenager. He instantly became an ambassador for the Grapefruit League.

 

“People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring,” Hornsby said.