Phillies•Unique Columns•WegENT Blog
Sand in my boots – Revisiting the magic of Spring Training
It started in 2018. My father, brother, and I booked an early March flight to Tampa Bay, Florida — the first of which would become an annual pilgrimage to watch the Phillies Spring Training games. Home from Ithaca on Spring Break, my college baseball career had taken a turn during my Sophomore year. I was no longer a catcher on the Varsity team, demoted to practicing with the JV squad and truth be told, my heart wasn’t really in it. What my heart was into, however, was Phillies baseball, and the Clearwater confines of Spectrum Field gave me plenty of it.
Over the past 3 years my father, brother and I have found magic on the gulf coast — from attending games across the Grapefruit league to hiking through the sand of remote natural lands. Every stadium brought us closer to the game, not only in our proximity to the field — we could practically touch our favorite players — but in our appreciation of the sport. It didn’t matter if we were arguing with cantankerous old men at the Pirates stadium or rooting for some Minor-leaguer trying to make his mark, we’d found fandom in Florida. Each trip ended in the same way all of our adventures have — with a game of catch before we left for the airport to rejoin the real world.
Every pilgrimage to Spring Training has served as a touchpoint for my life, a rare constant in the whirlwind that is the college experience. Each year I’d look through the same Tampa Bay hotel windows and each year the same gulf sunset would stare right back; that fading pink sky stayed with me through my first real heartbreak my Junior year to the looming uncertainty in my final college semester in 2020. I can still hear my friend telling me, “relax man, I’ll see you in a week”, when I departed for Spring Break last March, unaware that I had taken my final steps on my college campus.
Now, as we march into February, another Spring Training nears to mark the memories of the past year. I doubt I’ll be so fortunate as to attend, or if it will even occur at all due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the internal significance remains the same. For me, Spring Training is a time to reflect, not so much on the state of the Phillies organization, but on where I stand in life and the part that baseball plays in it.
Like I’m sure many have, I’ve struggled in this past year. My March 2020 trip to Clearwater felt like my last breath of real-life, starting with my virtual college graduation last May the subsequent months snowballed into a year of unemployment, weight gain, and depression. A complete lack of the social life I enjoyed in college and the unnervingly slow progression of my professional future at times have left me feeling rudderless. But all is not lost — and not just because of the imminent return of Phillies baseball. See, reflecting on Spring Training gives me a chance to see how I’ve grown, not just in this past year, but across the last 3 trips I made to Tampa Bay. In writing my blog I scanned through the pictures I took on those last 3 trips — in doing so I was forced to scan through thousands of memories from 2018 until now. Some of these memories were painful, others were joyous, and many were in between. All of them were equally important, however, in my appreciation of the boy that I’ve been and the man that I’m going to become.
As always, baseball will remain a large part of my identity, both as a person and as a writer. The beauty of Spring Training lies in how it reminds the true fan just how essential baseball is to them. There is a purity in watching a game that means nothing to the team, but everything to you — it reawakens that childhood wonder that caused you to fall in love with the sport. I can still remember knocking the sand from my boots after playing catch with my father and brother on the Clearwater beach last March. Every pop of the baseball against my black leather mitt felt like an echo of childhood memories, each throw following the next through the fabric of our lives. I can only hope to return to Spring Training, the place that fills my boots with sand and my eyes with wonder. Let’s hope it happens soon.
Featured Image: Ballpark Digest
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