Training -- not hope -- springs eternal

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I hate to be the one to tell you this, but spring training will never be the same again. Free agency was what finally killed it.

You see, spring training was always only incidentally about real time and place. It was primarily about hope, nurtured in a thing called the Grapefruit League -- or the Cactus League -- made up of equal parts imagination and hyperbole. In many respects, the baseball season never lived up to spring training, because the baseball season was real, and in every game half of the people had to lose.

Spring training was not the here and now. It was a window on a better, warmer time ahead. Always, there were what we called phenoms in the Grapefruit League. Suddenly, some busher who had hit .270 in five years in the minors was going to be a major-league star. Distance and dreams made this possible.

Of course, a lot has changed through the years. Once Sunbelt cities started getting franchises, spring didn't seem so particularly special anymore. I mean, in Houston or L.A., wirephotos of the boys by the palm trees just couldn't mean a whole lot when there's a palm tree out on your very verandah. Why now, the Florida Marlins go north to practice.

Anyway, suddenly anybody could fly south -- special fare if you stay over Saturday night -- and see for yourself that the .270-hitting minor leaguer just looked like a .270-hitting minor leaguer who got a few lucky bingles in the sunshine.

And then professional hockey and basketball became national and important and college basketball appropriated March for genuine madness -- not for sappy illusion -- and the Grapefruit League dropped to fourth or fifth on the ten o'clock sports spot: "And finally Babette, in other news today, our Pirates beat the Orioles at Fort Lauderdale in a slugfest."

But free agency -- that was the final blow. With free agency, fans always live, in every sport, in a sort of perpetual Grapefruit League. Always before, sports teams used to exist in cycles, you see. They were either building or rebuilding. Occasionally, at the top of the cycle, plugging holes. The promise of victory was often distant, but we understood that and we accepted it. Baseball, like America, was more incremental then. Work your way up. Little by little.

But now there is a lotto mentality rife in the air, and every fan believes that his team can sign this free agent and that one and -- poof -- overnight: championship. You hear it on the talk radio. You read it in the columns: "We gotta get ... We gotta sign." All year, every league is the Kasbah -- new lamps for old. Every team is one quarterback, one power forward, one southpaw wing, one free agent away from the title. Sign 'em up and be saved.

So really, we don't need spring training anymore. Not for spring. Not for dreams. Not for grapefruits and sunshine and surprises and illusions. Really, all we need spring training for now is ... well, for training.

Let's cut out the poetry and get right to Opening Day.

Frank Deford is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair magazine, sports columnist for National Public Radio and ESPN and correspondent on the HBO magazine show "Realsport."

Among his many honors, Deford, a longtime senior writer for Sports Illustrated, was six times voted Sportswriter of the Year by his peers at the National Association of Sportscasters and Sportswriters. The American Journalism Review has cited him as the nation's Best Sportswriter, and twice he was honored as Magazine Writer of the Year by the Washington Journalism Review. He has also been presented with a Christopher Award (for his memoir about his daughter -- Alex: The Life Of A Child) and with distinguished service-to-journalism awards from both the University of Missouri and Northeastern University.

Two of the 11 books Deford has written have been made into movies. He wrote the screenplay for the film comedy "Trading Hearts," and currently he is researching a new historical novel.

Deford, who was editor and publisher of the short-lived but highly acclaimed National Sports Daily, has been a weekly regular on NPR's "Morning Edition" since 1980. His commentaries can be heard three times a week on the ESPN Radio Network and periodically on ESPN television. In 1988 he was awarded an Emmy for his work on NBC at the Seoul Olympics.

For the past decade, Deford has served as chairman of the national Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. He resides in Westport, Conn., with his wife of 30 years, Carol. The Defords have two children -- a son, Chris, and a daughter, Scarlet. A native of Baltimore, Deford graduated from Princeton University in 1962.

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