Itinerary: Cactus League spring training

Many sports travelers, myself included, have this romantic notion of taking multi-city, multi-stadium trips over the course of several days or weeks as their dream vacation. And many sports travelers, myself included, never do it because of time or budgetary concerns, or they break it up into several chunks over several years.

If baseball is the sport you’re most fond of, then consider spring training the poor man’s version of the ambitious ballpark tour. You have much less ground to cover geographically, you can theoretically stay in the same hotel room for the duration of your trip, and you can typically spend much less on tickets, parking, concessions, etc. OK, so you’re not going to the actual major-league ballparks or major-league cities, and you’re going to games in which the star players are usually out by the sixth inning. But in some ways, this is good, too — you can focus less on the game and more on the surroundings, the fans, and simply having a good time.

If your spring training destination is the Cactus League, you have some distinct advantages over the Grapefruit League in Florida (you can read about our weekend sojourn in Florida from a couple springs ago for a refresher) — the main one being that all of the Cactus League’s parks are within the Phoenix metropolitan area, and all you need is some time and a dependable car to visit all of them. In addition, the Cactus League’s parks are, by and large, newer and fancier than the Grapefruit League’s brethren (thanks to the same law that bequeathed this impressive behemoth onto the sports world), and so several of them are sights to behold in themselves. That’s a big reason why, when Mrs. Fan and I planned out a three-day weekend trip to Phoenix at the beginning of this exhibition season, we put on our docket the Cactus League’s three newest parks: Goodyear Ballpark, Salt River Fields and Camelback Ranch.

Itinerary: Citizens Bank Park, Philadelphia

Since The Itinerant Fan is a blog about being a sports fan and this particular entry is about seeing a game in Philadelphia, perhaps it’s best to get this out of the way first: There’s nothing to be scared of.

Sports fans in Philadelphia tend to get a bad rap around the country as being boorish, angry, etc. — it gets mentioned a lot on TV, usually with the example cited that fans once booed Santa Claus. Certainly incidents such as this and this can be used to justify this reputation, but in my opinion it’s really been overblown. I have the benefit of having lived in the region for four years (and believe me, I had my problems with it considering I’m from laid-back California, and if you try being laid-back anywhere in the Northeast region of the country you’re bound to get run over by a train or a car or a person or anything else that doesn’t have time for you) and attended my fair share of games in Philadelphia. Fans there are intense and can go a little over the top, yes. But they’re also some of the most knowledgeable fans you’ll find, and if you know your sports then you’ll get along with them just fine no matter who you root for.

(By the way, why do people still bring up this booing Santa Claus thing? How long ago did that happen, anyway? Again, you can cite any number of things to justify calling the Philadelphia fan boorish, but let’s just retire the Santa Claus thing already. Pretend for a moment that you went to your high school reunion, and despite the fact you got good grades, played four years of varsity football and were homecoming king your junior AND senior years, all anyone wanted to talk to you about was that time you pulled the fire alarm and set the sprinklers off in science class. How would you feel? Probably not much different than a Philadelphia sports fan would feel every time someone says, “But you guys booed Santa Claus!”)