Baseball spring training starts in only 10 days. How great is that? It is a sure sign that spring has just about sprung. It reminds me of when I would head down to Stuart, Florida years ago to visit my mother and take in a few exhibition games while I was there. I took the photograph on the left back in March of 1996, when I drove down to Municipal Stadium in West Palm Beach to watch an Atlanta Braves exhibition game. The Braves and Montreal Expos trained there through the spring of 1997, after which the Braves moved to a new stadium in Kissimmee, near Disney World, and the Expos to newly built Roger Dean Stadium in Jupiter, Florida.
I actually liked that old ballpark. My mother and father and uncle and aunt would often go down there in the summer to watch the West Palm Beach Expos, a Florida State League Class A team, play, and take advantage of those evening breezes off the ocean. These days major league teams look at spring training as a money generator, and demand that cities provide them with modern, mini versions of their home ballparks. After losing those two teams after 1997, West Palm Beach finally built one of those new parks and lured the Washington Nationals (who ironically used to be the Montreal Expos) and Houston Astros to train there. Of course, not only have we lost the charm of those old parks, but spring training ticket prices have increased exponentially, often costing as much as a regular season game. Talk about adding insult to injury.
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