Postcard from Tucson – The End of Spring Training

Major League Spring training in Arizona is over. The teams have all headed to their respective cities to begin the regular season. For us folks down here in Tucson, it may be the last Spring Training games we ever see.

You see, there are only two teams now playing their games here…the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Colorado Rockies. According to them, they need 3 or 4 teams to make Tucson a viable training facility. Last year, the Chicago White Sox left here for the Phoenix area. And according to the teams’ contracts, unless there are three teams here, they can break their lease and go elsewhere with no penalty. There are efforts to build a new stadium to attract more teams, but we shall see where that leads in this time of deep recession.

Be that as it may, I took advantage of their last week in Tucson to take in two games, one of which was the L.A. Dodgers. For that game I took my Nikon and, as it turned out, I got a great seat four rows behind the Dodger dugout….perfect for watching and photographing the game.

This was also my first visit to Tucson’s Electric Park. All my other Spring Training games where at nearby Hi Corbett Field. Frankly, I prefer Electric Park as their is no netting between me and the field, save for the usual behind home plate. It made watching and photographing the game much more enjoyable.

The Dodger game was the best of the entire Spring Training schedule, as it was tied going into the 9th inning. The Dodgers won it the old fashioned way with one run in the 9th…a walk, stolen base, errant throw and a sacrifice fly. Now that is baseball! It doesn’t mean anything in the standings and no one will remember it perhaps except me…but it was a baseball game that both teams tried to win.

And it may have been one of the last games ever played here in Tucson. That would be sad. As I said in a previous blog about baseball, I don’t follow Major League Baseball anymore…they lost me as a fan after the last labor strike. But, Spring Training games are just plain fun…tickets are very inexpensive, the weather is great, and the players are more relaxed here than the regular season.

The pictures here show Dodger manager and former Yankee great Joe Torre signing autographs before the game, the Diamondbacks mascot having fun with a Dodger fan, and my favorite, a home run swing by a D’Back player that I was just lucky enough to capture before the ball left the park.

I sincerely hope the teams come back here…but if not, thanks for the memories.