Dimensions Weekly Mens Lifestyle Magazine

1943-1945: The War Years
During World War II baseball was firmly entrenched as the National Pastime, and team owners were very conscious of their responsibilities as national leaders while also recognizing the need to continue making money. At a time when most Americans were scaling back, using milk and gas rations and setting up Victory Gardens, baseball was arguably a luxury that a wartime national could not afford.

Baseball during this period was a series of compromises. Most minor leagues shut down. And while the major leagues kept playing -- with the personal approval of President Franklin Roosevelt, who let baseball continue under the grounds that it boosted homeland morale -- they did so under scaled-back circumstances. Baseball players were exempted from the draft, and many stars served their county in wartime.

One major compromise, worked out between Commissioner Landis and Joseph B. Eastman, director of the federal Office of Defense Transportation, was that spring training would be held close to the teams' home bases, north of the Potomac and Ohio Rivers and east of the Mississippi. (The Cardinals, the White Sox and the Cubs were limited to training Missouri, Indiana or Illinois.) During wartime the trains were crammed with supplies and troops, and in that context transporting baseball players and their fans seemed to be a frivolous use of precious resources.

This boundary -- known as the Landis-Eastman Line or the Potomac Line -- ensured that teams training close to their home basis. The New York Yankees ended up training in Asbury Park, N.J., while the Red Sox trained Tufts College in nearby Medford, Mass.

1946-present: Today's Cactus and Grapefruit Leagues Are Born
When Arizona interests lured the Giants and the Indians for spring training in 1947, spring training was a different beast in terms of economics and schedules. Teams had trained out West many times before World War II -- most notably the Chicago Cubs, who first trained in Santa Monica in 1905 and then trained on California's Catalina Island between 1922-1942 and again in 1950-1951 -- and it was not uncommon for teams to train in California and Arizona and then barnstorm their way back home.

The Cactus League became a reality in 1947, when Horace Stoneham's New York Giants and Bill Veeck's Cleveland Indians took up residence in Phoenix and Tucson, respectively. That Veeck ended up in Tucson wasn't a surprise -- he owned ranches in the Southwest and at the time owned a ranch near Tucson -- and Stoneham was a natural for Phoenix, as he developed business interests in the area.

By this time, spring training was a formalized institution. Teams realized that there was money to be made from spring training, and over the years many teams tried to combine some sort of real-estate development with spring training. Horace Stoneham ended up developing a luxury resort centered around the San Francisco Giants spring-training routines; most recently, the Kansas City Royals were lured into participating in the Boardwalk and Baseball theme park in central Florida: the Royals trained at Baseball City adjacent to a theme park with a turn-of-the-century baseball theme.

In recent years Arizona's Cactus League has made inroads in luring teams from Florida. Last season, for instance, both the Kansas City Royals and the Texas Rangers shifted training facilities from Florida to Surprise, a suburb of Phoenix. There has been some assaults on the Florida/Arizona spring-training setup: most recently Las Vegas officials wooed several teams in an attempt to lure four of them to train in Vegas. Their efforts failed. DW will come up with our own Staff pics for the upcoming MLB season next week!

-DW | Sports Corner