Alright, so I wanted to figure out this whole spring training setup in Florida. You know, February and March hit, and suddenly baseball is all anyone’s talking about, especially down south. I’m always trying to get a handle on where all these teams actually set up shop. It’s not like they’re all in one city, that’s for sure.
Getting Started
So, the first thing I did was try to get a list of all the teams that actually do their spring thing in Florida. They call it the Grapefruit League, which is kinda neat. I started just by searching around online. Some info was easy to find, some was buried in team websites or news articles. I remember seeing stuff about the Rays and Yankees kicking things off in Tampa around late February, like maybe the 21st or something. That gave me a starting point, at least for one location.
My main goal was to get a visual, like a simple map. I’m a visual guy, so just seeing a list of cities doesn’t always click for me. I wanted to see the spread. Are they all clustered together? Or are they all over the state? Spoilers: they’re pretty spread out.
The Actual Process
Once I had a decent list of teams and their host cities or stadium names, I started the “mapping” part. This wasn’t anything super fancy, mind you. I didn’t use any complicated GIS software or anything like that. I basically just pulled up a general map of Florida and started pinpointing locations. For each team, I’d find their spring training facility – places like Joker Marchant Stadium for the Tigers in Lakeland, or JetBlue Park for the Red Sox in Fort Myers. It was a bit of a grind, to be honest. Search, find address, plot point. Repeat. Lots of clicking.
- Finding the spots: This took the most time. Some stadiums are well-known, others less so.
- Plotting them: I just used a basic digital mapping tool you can find anywhere. Nothing proprietary. Just something to drop pins on.
- Double-checking: I tried to make sure I wasn’t putting, say, the Marlins’ facility in the middle of the Everglades. That wouldn’t be too helpful.
I spent a good few hours just going through the list. Sometimes I’d get sidetracked reading about a particular stadium’s history or the town it was in. It’s funny, you start a simple project and then go down these little rabbit holes. I didn’t bother with super precise addresses for parking or anything, just the general location of the ballpark. Good enough for a quick overview.
What I Ended Up With
So, after all that, I had this nice little map with a bunch of dots scattered across central and southern Florida. You could clearly see clusters around areas like Tampa Bay/St. Pete, and then another bunch over on the Atlantic coast, and some down south around Fort Myers. It was pretty cool to see it all laid out. It wasn’t a professional cartographer’s masterpiece, just my own quick-and-dirty visual guide.
Why bother? Well, partly just for myself. I like knowing these things. And sometimes friends ask, “Hey, who trains near Orlando?” or “How far is it between the Yankees and the Phillies’ camps?” Now I can just pull up my little map and show them. It’s not like it’s a groundbreaking piece of work, but it’s practical. It answers the basic “where are they?” question pretty well.
It’s one of those things, you do it once, and then it’s handy to have around each spring. Maybe I’ll update it next year if a team moves, but for now, it serves its purpose. Just a simple way to see where the baseball action is happening in Florida before the real season gets going.
