A Place for Bright Starts

By Tom Callahan

Something disturbing is going on in Florida. Parodying the rest of the map, ambitious little villages are swiping one another's ball clubs. Just this spring the Cincinnati Reds have moved from Tampa to Plant City, the New York Mets from St. Petersburg to Port St. Lucie and the Kansas City Royals from Fort Myers to an amusement park in Haines City once known as Circus World and now identified as Boardwalk & Baseball.

A Ferris wheel peeks over the roof into the stadium, and a roller coaster screams by third base. Though the infield grass is plastic, the place is handsome. "Almost too nice," says the pitcher Bret Saberhagen. "It doesn't feel like spring training." In the name of civic pride and the interest of land development, tin and wood are being traded everywhere for aluminum and concrete.

A particularly unsettling development has the sister cities of St. Pete and Tampa at each other's wryneck throats. Bucking nature and tradition, both have been bidding for full-time baseball, either an expansion team or a carpetbagger. Tampa has gone so far as to draw up blueprints for a domed stadium. St. Pete has gone much further: the skeleton of its dome has already been assembled on the former site of a gas plant (prompting a Tampa editorial cartoonist to depict the players and fans in gas masks). The state is growing, and Floridians no longer believe it to be in the proper order of things that they restrict their diet to grapefruit.

Even in baseball, change is unavoidable. Pam Postema, for example, is getting a tryout this spring as the National League's first female umpire. But in the 100 years since baseball teams first came South, alterations have seemed slight. The late writer Francis Stann of the late newspaper the Washington Star once asked the failing Babe Ruth in his camel-hair coat what ( he remembered about Al Lang Stadium in St. Pete. Motioning toward an old hotel a full city block beyond the right-field fence, Ruth rasped, "The day I hit the West Coast Inn." "Wow!" said Stann. "Pretty good belt." "But don't forget," Ruth added, "the park was a block back toward this way then."

Spring training has never been a place for precise memories or exact measurements. The Boston pitcher Roger Clemens and the Montreal outfielder Tim Raines demonstrated again last season that the exercise is essentially a mental one for the fans. After finances kept them from spring training in 1987, Clemens still won 20 games and the Cy Young Award, while Raines hit .330 with a four-for-five debut that included a grand-slam home run. Maybe Florida has forgotten that it is a state of mind.

"How could they ever find anything better than this?" says Detroit Manager Sparky Anderson, who is sitting outside an enclosed batting cage enjoying the sound of ash and cowhide and the sight of veterans Darrell Evans and Alan Trammell gathering scattered baseballs, like mushrooms, to reload Iron Mike. The pitching machine is run by Coach Billy Consolo, Anderson's best childhood friend, the boy who 40 years ago in Los Angeles helped him steal all of Trumpeter Harry James' baseball equipment.

"Hey Billy," the manager calls conspiratorially into the cage, "did Harry James have equipment?"

"Oh God," comes a young-old voice from inside.

"Once we spotted it, he didn't have any," whispers Anderson, who made partial restitution years later by giving James a Cincinnati windbreaker and a good laugh.

"I used to manage the Reds," Anderson informed two Soviet scouts who came to Lakeland a couple of weeks ago to solicit fundamentals. "It's a bad soldier who doesn't dream to be a general," said Alexander Ardatov, coach of the Soviets' budding national team. "Right," Sparky told him, "and if you can hit, you can play."

So there is still charm in Florida. Like the little girl singing the opening-day anthem at Port St. Lucie with a finger jammed in each ear; and Miss Clearwater presiding over the Phillies' inaugural in her sash and tiara; and Bobby Bonds' son Barry, a young outfielder for the Pirates, remarking in the dugout, "I liked most of my father's teams: the Cards, Yanks, Angels, White Sox, Rangers, Cubs, Giants -- not Cleveland." And the real-life pitcher Jack Armstrong, who like his namesake from the 1930s radio series seems to incarnate the all-American boy.

A 6-ft. 5-in. righthanded fast-baller (wearing a CAN'T MISS tag), Armstrong arrived at the Reds' camp this spring full of enthusiasm and good deeds. "I've waited 22 years for an opportunity to pitch in the major leagues," he says, meaning he must have been contemplating it at the age of one. "He'd run through that wall if you asked him to," smiles Manager Pete Rose, who has finished running through walls himself. But Jack Armstrong will probably begin the season in the minors, in some small and scrubby place appropriate to bright starts.