It's the end of an era in Cactus League baseball tomorrow, when the Colorado Rockies and Arizona Diamondbacks square off before the teams move to the Phoenix area for Spring Training 2011.
It's the end of an era in Cactus League baseball tomorrow, when the Colorado Rockies and Arizona Diamondbacks square off before the teams move to the Phoenix area for Spring Training 2011.
Spring training first came to Tucson in 1947 when Bill Veeck brought his Cleveland Indians to the Old Pueblo; not so coincidentally Veeck had a ranch in the area and didn't want to stray too far from home at the beginning of training. Since then spring training has been a part of the Tucson scene (mostly at Hi Corbett Park), with the Rockies coming in 1993 and the Diamondbacks in 1998.
The loss of spring training is always a sad thing for any community. True, college/high-school tourneys will fill both ballparks next spring and perhaps even make more of a financial impact than spring training now makes (just ask Winter Haven folks about that). And the Golden Baseball League puts on a decent regular-season show at Hi Corbett. But there's a psychic loss to the community that goes beyond the dollars and cents, and we're sure next spring will feel a little emptier to the Tucson folks. Some of our best times in baseball were wandering the back fields at Hi Corbett; there's a unique quality to baseball chatter during workouts, and you could get very close to it in Tucson. We'll miss that.
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