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When St. Petersburg's future mayor Al Lang was negotiating with St. Louis Browns owner Branch Rickey to bring spring training to St. Petersburg in 1914, the two men agreed that the city businessmen sponsoring the trip would pay for the Browns travel to St. Pete, and pay for their lodging while they were there. They also agreed that the comped traveling party would include five writers from the St. Louis newspapers. The newspaper guys were key for St. Petersburg. This whole spring training deal was an effort to get the city's name out there, and how better to do it than through the datelines in big city newspapers. "There can be no cleaner, no more penetrating, no more exhaustive advertising for [our] city," wrote the organizers, "than the letters and telegrams to their home papers, written by the high-class, competent correspondents and writers who always accompany these major league ball clubs during their spring training trips." (My favorite part of that, by the way, is where it says: "high-class, competent correspondents and writers." We sportswriters haven't always gotten that kind of respect. )

Ninety-five years later, when the Phoenix suburb ...

A reporter asked me today which was my favorite of all the spring training sites. I told her that I had always been partial to two places that lost spring training this year — Dodgertown in Vero Beach and Al Lang Field in St. Petersburg — and told her why — the history and ambiance of Dodgertown, that great view of Tampa Bay from Al Lang.

But that got me to thinking: How long can I keep saying my favorite spring training site isn't a spring training site anymore, and what then, among the active sites, would now be my favorite?

There are really no bad spring training sites. Among the current inventory of spring training parks and facilities, all but one has been either built or completely overhauled in the last twenty years.

But which one is the best? What makes a spring training site special? Is it the grandeur of the ballpark? The new parks in Glendale (White Sox and Dodgers) and Goodyear (Indians) will certainly enter the conversation as more people visit them; but most discussions of grand spring training stadiums would probably begin with Steinbrenner Field, formerly Legends Field, the Tampa home of the Yankees. Surely Champion Stadium at Walt Disney World is as pretty as they come, its lines and construction evoking parks of the 1920s, with all the 21st century amenities. But as much as the visual evokes the heritage of the game, the damn place keeps changing its name practically every year. It's only a decade old and it's been known officially as Disney Field, Crackerjack Stadium, The Ballpark at Disney's Wide World of Sports, and now Champion Stadium. What kind of heritage can there be a place that changes its name all the time?

The prettiest, most comfortable, most amenity-rich spring training ballpark is probably Brighthouse Networks Field in Clearwater, where the Phillies play. But it sits on one of the ugliest pieces of land in all of Florida, surrounded by high-voltage electrical wires and a particularly busy and soulless piece of U.S. Route 19.

So, is the scenery beyond the outfield fences important? Tough to beat the Cactus League parks then. Virtually every park looks out upon a mountain range, and in Tempe Diablo Stadium, the mountain looms just past the left field fence, sorta' like the wall at Fenway Park only five time higher.

Is history important? With this year's shuttering of Dodgertown, Winter Haven and Al Lang, that really leaves only two choices. Fort Lauderdale Stadium was built for the Yankees in 1962 and has been home to the Orioles since the Yankees left for Tampa in '96. It's a window on old-time spring training, which is exactly why it's doomed. It doesn't have the clubhouse, strength-training, or medical-rehab facilities to support a modern spring training, and it doesn't even have room for the Orioles minor leaguers, who train across the state in Sarasota. So the Orioles will be leaving Fort Lauderdale for somewhere, maybe as early as next year.

I saw spring training's two newest complexes last Friday and they are spectacular. They are places of beauty as well as function, and the cities that built them — the west Phoenix suburbs of Glendale and Goodyear — are confident that they will be a boon to their community, growing their national profiles and their economies as well.

These new facilities — the Dodgers and White Sox share Glendale and the Indians are down in Goodyear — are the very symbol of what I have been writing about these last three years, the symbol of what the new spring training has become — state-of-the-art conditioning and rehab facilities for the players, and theme-park-like destination resorts for the fans. When Goodyear is done building its new downtown city center around the ballpark in a few years, the concourse around the grandstand will become a city street; pedestrians on non-game days will be able to use the grandstand as park benches. There is land inside the gates of the park that city officials expect will one day house hotels.

The one dark cloud in the blue skies over these complexes ...

The Cactus League, spring training baseball in Arizona, really had two beginnings. The first came in 1947, and it was a very small part of the American civil rights movement. Cleveland Indians owner Bill Veeck had been watching closely the progress of Jackie Robinson, intending to integrate his own team as soon as the Robinson story played out. Veeck had had some uncomfortable run-ins with segregation while running spring training in Florida for the minor league Milwaukee Brewers, and he felt that Arizona would be more hospitable to an integrated team. So in 1947, he took the Indians to Tucson, persuading Horace Stoneham to bring the New York Giants to Phoenix so the Indians would have someone to play exhibition games against. There were no blacks at Indians spring training in 1947; Veeck integrated the Indians in July of that year when he signed Larry Doby. When he brought Doby to spring training in 1948, he found he was only partly right about Tucson and an integrated team. The city was not exactly welcoming, just less hostile than many places in segregated Florida might have been.

The ...

Waiting at the airport to go from Orlando to Phoenix has summoned thoughts of spring training travel, and the differences between March baseball in Florida and Arizona.

Travel is probably the critical difference between Grapefruit and Cactus leagues. It is, at the very least, the difference that gets talked about with the most passion and regularity. In Arizona, 12 of the 14 teams are located in and around Phoenix. The largest spread between any two teams training in the Valley of the Sun is the 40 miles between the Angels in Tempe and the Royals and Rangers up in Surprise. Two teams, the Rockies and the Diamondbacks, play down in Tucson, just over a hundred miles from the center of Phoenix, and players and writers — especially the writers — grumble whenever they have to make the 90-minute to two-hour trip through the desert for a game down in Tucson. "Ease of travel" is the one phrase general managers and team officials most regularly use when talking about why they like training in Arizona.

In Florida, by contrast, 90 minutes would be a rather short bus ride; the ...