The Padres beat the Mariners on Monday to wrap up another fun spring training.
Disclaimer: I can’t help but enjoy any spring training.
I’ve been a sucker for these baseball fiestas since my dad first took my brothers and me from Riverside to Palm Springs.
Granted astounding proximity, we could watch Chico Ruiz, Jim Fregosi and other California Angels players take batting practice and hear the players talking. Unlike at Anaheim Stadium, it felt you could touch the game. My dad enjoyed seeing Dwight Eisenhower and Joe DiMaggio, both of whom would sit just a dozen or so rows away.
Looking back, I can see that larger forces were also at work.
Windswept Palm Springs wasn’t subject to the smog alerts that were a fact of life in Riverside, before regulations cleaned up the Southland’s air.
The war in Vietnam soon would call upon my dad, a navigator on U.S. Air Force KC-135 Stratotankers, sending us to Philadelphia near my mom’s relatives. Though uncles and aunts took our cousins and us to our youth games and those of professional teams, enabling me to see Willie Mays hit a home run near his career’s end, the combination of Philadelphia’s winters and my dad’s absence only reinforced my appreciation for the baseball-and-family fun in California.
Years later, after my dad’s next transfer had taken us to Ohio, I would travel to Tampa, Fla., for Cincinnati Reds camp. Escaping an icebox to soak up the Grapefruit League clinched it: spring training couldn’t be surpassed.
In the sportswriting dodge, I’ve spent many spring trainings in Arizona, often feeling like I was playing hooky.
Numerous memories surface whenever I return to Padres camp in Peoria, the team’s home since 1994.
Atop the golden oldies list: Ken Caminiti’s visit to a heckler one March night in 1998.
A middle-aged man, sitting among women and children, hollered insults at Caminiti for three innings from behind the third-base line.
This wasn’t standard ballpark razzing.
“It was personal,” Caminiti said.
After exiting in the sixth so he could ice a surgically repaired knee, Caminiti changed clothes.
And circled back to Peoria Stadium … where he sat right next to his critic.
“I said, ‘How are you doing? I was just on the field a moment ago. Remember me?’’ Caminiti said.
He asked why the man felt the need to shout insults at him.
“Is it because you paid for the ticket that you feel like you can yell those things at me?” he said.
“He said it was because he wanted the team to do well,” the third baseman said. “I told him I wouldn’t come to his job and yell those things at him.”
When Caminiti stood up, he got a standing ovation.
Garth Brooks, of all folks, created enduring memories a year later while training with the Padres.
Like the ballplayers, the country music star had rare timing in his own craft.
His mini-concert in the Padres’ cafeteria and riffs in and around the clubhouse felt uncannily on time, even to my uninitiated ear.
“He told me to get a metronome and work with it over and over,” said a Padres staffer who could hold a tune and performed in concerts but lacked Brooks’ precision.
By the end of camp, having found rhythm and balance in the batter’s box, where he’d flailed often at the outset, Brooks was cracking hard shots in batting practice. The lesson: Merv Rettenmund and Bruce Bochy could coach up almost anyone.
Brooks’ people skills distinguished him no less than his singing.
He remembered the names of non-Padres folks. Asked questions. Listened. Lightened the atmosphere.
Spring training isn’t without its flaws. It could stand to be trimmed by about two weeks. The games have become more diluted, in part due to the World Baseball Classic. Starters have shifted more outings from the Cactus League to back-field scrimmages. Teams skirt the requirement to have two projected field starters appear in road games.
On balance, it’s still a rewarding, if increasingly pricey, few hours.
Just minutes into the Padres-Mariners Cactus League annual opener, in mid-February, the party got going. Seeing a first-inning popup land nearby in the field-level seats, a woman in a Mariners jersey went after it like a Seahawks linebacker diving for a fumble.
She emerged with the ball, raised it high and danced. Many of the 10,000 fans cheered.
A group of boys with gloves took a few empty seats next to me, several rows above first base.
They asked if it was a good spot for foul balls. Every time a hitter took a swing, they leaned forward.
My dad, who died in September, would’ve loved that part the most.
Spring training did its job: as much as circumstances allow, everyone’s ready for the season, which, for the Padres, begins Thursday in the East Village.