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Baseball and BeachesSummertime fun comes early each year to Florida's Gulf Coast. By Bill Beuttler (Unpublished, written on assignment for National Geographic Traveler, 1998) Will Clark, the star first baseman of the Texas Rangers, slides hard across home plate for a run against the expansion Devil Rays. In the stands, his wife, Lisa, flashes a proprietary smile, then glances down at two-year-old Trey, who’s been bouncing through the early innings of his dad’s game from his perch on mom’s lap. Trey doesn’t seem particularly concerned with what’s happening on the field, but the fact is, most of the grownups around him aren’t all that much interested in keeping score, either. This is spring training: the Grapefruit League, as it’s called here in Florida. A time for old pros like Clark to play themselves ready for the regular season. A time for young prospects to show management what they can do. And for us vacationing northerners out here in the grandstands, a time to see major league players in a relaxed, minor-league-sized setting — the modern-day boys of summer and the March Florida sun combining to give winter-weary fans a soul-soothing sneak preview of the summer ahead. Arizona has spring-training baseball, too — the so-called Cactus League — but for my money, the best place for using baseball to get a jump start on summer is the stretch of Gulf Coast Florida between Sarasota and Fort Myers. Several of America’s very finest beaches are within short drives of those two towns, and what would summer be without beaches? Think about it: four major league spring training ballparks and a half-dozen of the country’s best beaches all bunched together along 100 miles of Florida coastline. There’s no better place in the world for killing off winter’s chill with a springtime sampling of these two classic American summer pastimes. Even the ballplayers and their families come to look forward to March in Florida, where most games are played in the afternoon sun, as God and Abner Doubleday intended. “We’re always about the first ones down here,” says Lisa Clark. “It’s like a regular job. They go to work, and get home around 5. You can have dinner, watch TV — a normal life.” Moreover, the games have a casualness to them that Lisa appreciates. “They care if they win or lose,” she says, “but it doesn’t matter so much if they have a bad day.” It matters even less to the folks watching them. For the spectators, the point of Grapefruit League baseball isn’t winning and losing; it’s to slather on some sun lotion, get yourself a hotdog and a beer, and to sit there and let all that Florida sunshine warm away the last lingering effects of winter. The intimacy of spring-training ballparks — most of which host minor league teams come summer and only hold 7,000 seats or so — allows you to savor major league heroes running, throwing, and hitting from relatively up close, even in the cheap seats. But you’re watching them purely to enjoy those specific physical skills, without any real concern for statistics. And when you’re not actively watching the players, it’s because you’re being amused by the entertainingly minor-league hookiness surrounding them: the P.A. announcer in Sarasota, for example, awarding a free car wash and 10 bucks worth of gas to the owner of the vehicle chosen that day’s “dirtiest car in the parking lot.” The sun, the laid-back ambience on the field and in the stands — it’s all lushly narcotizing, but sweetened, too, by the hopefulness of spring. This is the time, after all, for baseball teams to begin putting their “wait till next year” promises to the test, and here in Florida, the real season not yet begun, such promises still seem keepable. Wins and losses? I saw five games over four days this past March, and couldn’t tell you who won any of them without referring back to my notebook. But what did still stick with me several months later, quite indelibly, were images: Don Gullett, former star southpaw of Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine of the 1970s, his hair now flecked noticeably gray, watching an entire game from the playing field with a pair of fellow coaches, the three men seated a row of folding chairs set up beside the Reds’ on-deck circle. Hall-of-Famer Frank Robinson climbing off the field in street clothes and nonchalantly making his way through the box seats at Ed Smith Stadium in Sarasota, pausing to chitchat and sign authographs as he goes. A father leaning over and explaining to his young son, a few innings later, that that Robinson autograph he’d gotten was really worth getting excited about, because Robinson as a player hit more career homers than even Ken Griffey Jr. Fans slugging pitched water balloons with baseball bats between innings in the proximity of pretty young women in tight white t-shirts and orange short shorts, a promotion for the local Hooters chain restaurant. The stately palm trees lining the outfield wall at City of Palms Stadium in downtown Fort Myers, spring-training home of the Boston Red Sox . . . and the equally massive palm trees lining the walkway leading up to Bill Hammond Stadium, the Grapefruit League’s newest and prettiest ballpark and the Fort Myers home of the Minnesota Twins. The young Amish boy and his father — dressed in their 19th century-fashioned blues and grays, the father looking Lincolnesque with his moustacheless beard — taking in the timeless, still essentially innocent pleasure of an afternoon baseball game in Sarasota. That same afternoon, I chanced upon another Amish family scene: this time a mother, an infant, and a little girl, the mother and girl dressed alike in ankle-length dresses and sun bonnets for an afternoon at Siesta Key Public Beach. For all I know, they might have been related to the father and son I’d seen at that day’s ballgame. In any case, my coincidental sightings brought home the fundamental purity of baseball and beaches as leisure-time pleasures, even at the tail end of the 20th century. (Some things not even free agency and thong bikinis can corrupt.) The beauty of Sarasota and Fort Myers is that you can easily hop from one such pleasure to the other in a single afternoon, or, better yet, spend a week skipping back and forth from days watching baseball to days exploring the area’s exquisite white-sand beaches. The top beaches each have their own distinctive attributes. Fort Myers Beach is the place for crowds of vacationers and people-watching (it’s among the most popular recreational destinations in America, and a common destination for collegiate spring-breakers). Just downcoast from it is little-known Lover’s Key, accessible only via footpath or tram ride from the adjoining state park and hence the most isolated and pristine of the area’s beaches. Sanibel and Captiva Island, short drives southwest of Fort Myers and northwest of Fort Myers Beach, are world-famous destinations for seashell-collecting. Sarasota has Lido, North Lido, and South Lido beaches all in a row, south of Longboat Key. North Lido is the least crowded, Sarasota’s more accessible answer to Lover’s Key as a place for quiet walks and contemplation. Lido Beach itself is where swimmers and sun-bathers congregate, and South Lido is popular with families for nature walks and picnicking. My personal favorite, though, is the beach at Siesta Key, just across the Siesta Drive and Stickney Point Road causeways from Sarasota. There are plenty of swimmers and sunbathers here for excellent people-watching, but the beach is spread out enough that it never feels crowded — walk far enough along either end of it and the beach here becomes nearly as unpopulated as Lover’s Key or North Lido. The swimming here, even on an uncharacteristically choppy March afternoon, is fabulous. My father and I spent an exhilirating hour body-surfing big waves here after a Reds game last spring, while a handful of surfboarders did their thing out in the water a little beyond us and young children ran around toting plastic buckets and building sand castles back on shore. When we had finally played enough for one day, we changed back into our street clothes and discussed where we would watch that night’s sunset. That is the other nice thing about Florida’s Gulf Coast beaches: The sun always sets over the water. And when it is finished, you now thoroughly sated by the sunset’s beauty and your day at a beach or a ballpark or both, all that is left to do is to find some quiet place to have dinner and decide which of these classic American pleasures to pursue tomorrow. © Bill Beuttler |
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