Pitchers And Catchers Report Next Week!

Baseball season is almost here! Pitchers and catchers report next week to their spring training ballparks in Florida and Arizona. My South Side heroes, the Chicago White Sox, are heading to Camelback Ranch in Glendale, Arizona, the Chicago Cubs to Sloan Park in Mesa, Arizona, and the Colorado Rockies to Salt River Fields at Talking Stick, which is the first professional sports facility built on Indian land and also in Arizona. However, I have to admit that the only spring training game I have ever seen played by one of those teams was back in 1985 when the White Sox still trained at Payne Park in Sarasota, Florida, where I took the photograph above. This was the season after the White Sox traded my favorite player, LaMarr Hoyt - no doubt a distant relative - to the San Diego Padres. He was a great pitcher for the Sox, winning the American League Cy Young Award in 1983 and the first AL Championship game against the Baltimore Orioles the same year, but was traded to San Diego after the 1984 season. And sadly, after living a good, clean, simple life on the South Side of Chicago, was no doubt corrupted by the decadent California lifestyle and wound up being arrested four times on drug charges, which ended his baseball career. I guess it is probably a good thing that most of us can't afford to live in California these days. But as usual, I digress. Looking for a spring training photo for this blog post, I came to the realization that it has been exactly 30 years since I last attended a spring training game. Definitely time to attend another one. And so, when I head back to Florida this spring, I will do just that. And perhaps not even wait another 30 years to go to another one. At this time in life, time to just go crazy, right?