I love spring training. For me, there is no better February or March afternoon than putting on a spring training baseball game. The perfect visual of a sunny, small-town Floridian or Arizonan ballpark is the perfect reminder that blue skies, warm weather and the return of Major League Baseball are just around the corner.
Preseason football is boring, and preseason hockey is fine, I guess, but the talent discrepancy is glaring. But while the NFL and NHL’s preseason games have their needed place in their respective sports, they have absolutely nothing on spring training baseball.
For some reason, spring training is the only time of exhibition sport that I can truly get excited for, and I know I’m not alone. Not only have the television ratings soared in recent years, but attendance down south has skyrocketed in the years coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Last season, Florida’s Grapefruit League topped 1.4 million in attendance for an average of over 6,300 fans per game over the league’s 13 locations — its highest attendance total in seven years.
Similarly, in Arizona, the Cactus League totaled around 1.6 million in attendance, averaging around 7,400 fans per game over its 10 facilities — the league’s highest total attendance since 2019.
For fans and media alike, spring training games are the perfect opportunity to get a look at virtually every player within a major league organization. While every organization has a little bit of a different way of going about things, given the state of its team, everyone has the same agenda. But there’s just one thing that the spring training festivities are missing — a winner.
Of course, the primary focus of every team at spring training is to evaluate its roster and depth as best it can. Managers and coaching staffs try to find the balance between getting their youngest prospects some playing time, fostering reasonable competition for some Triple-A guys to snag major league jobs and getting the established players enough reps some action before the regular season kicks off in late March.
But what better way to get some extra ways to evaluate your players than by turning up the heat just a little bit towards the end?
What I am proposing is the creation of a spring training championship — something that gives the dying days of preseason action something to keep the energy going and the evaluation process for major league teams an extra layer or two.
Spring training has an abundance of games. The Pirates’ spring training schedule had 31 games at the start, not accounting for a few that might get rained out over the spring. That’s plenty of time for the Pirates to evaluate their talent before having any considerations of a championship game, should they qualify.
Creating a championship will also capitalize on the higher in-person attendance at spring training games. Last season, the Grapefruit League’s highest-attended day was March 23 — five days before the official start of MLB’s regular season. It’s the perfect time to cap off the spring entertainment and crown a winner.
Assuming travel is not an issue, here’s how I would set it up. The top four teams in each league qualify, with the first and fourth seeds and the second and third seeds playing each other in a winner-take-all game to advance. The two that advance play each other in another one-game bout, with the winner facing the opposing league champion.
Based on the higher win total or some tiebreaking metric, the lesser seed will travel to the other’s spring training state for a three-game series, with that winner earning the title of Spring Training Champions and some pool money awarded to the winning players as compensation.
If the MLB is unable to get the teams to travel across the country so close to the start of the regular season, each league can perform their own format and the winners are crowned the Grapefruit and Cactus League champions, respectively.
Though the title is ultimately meaningless, setting up a championship at the end gives the super young players a goal to work towards. Players hope they can serve as a catalyst for their team to get to the dance, earning extra playing time as a result.
For some of the older players, namely the guys who are playing in Double-A or Triple-A, adding prize money could push them to play harder. Most minor league salaries are very cheap, so there’s a real financial incentive to win it.
Organizations can choose whether to care about this silly little tournament, but I see a comparison to the NBA’s in-season tournament, which the NBA introduced two years ago.
Maybe an NBA organization values the NBA Cup, maybe they don’t. But most organizations do value wins, meaning they are still attempting to win all of their group stage and knockout games, because those games still count in the NBA standings.
Similarly, every organization values seeing their players progress and seeing their team put up spring training wins — because if you’re getting blown out in every spring game, something is deathly wrong with your ballclub.
Creating a championship that caps off the work put in at spring training will provide players with some extra motivation, organizations with a new evaluating tool and fans, both in-person and on TV, content to watch. So consider this my official petition to create a championship at the end of spring training.
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