Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Grapefruit vs Cactus League.

The NY Times had an article the other day which you can view here that discusses the finer points of how the teams in the Cactus leagues are pretty close together while the teams in Florida are spread out.

The Mets play a majority of there games against the Cardinals ,Nationals, Marlins ,Braves and Houston. As per the article 27 of the 34 games are against these 5 teams due to there proximity of where they are in Florida. The Mets watched a close foe the Dodgers move there camp to Arizona back in 2008, while the Orioles moved out to the West coast of Florida and now the Mets play them only 1 time instead of 4 or 5.

Some people seem to have an issue with this. I don’t really thinks it a big deal. The teams only use there starters for a couple of at bats per game and the pitchers don’t cycle through the order no more then once or twice until maybe there last 1 or 2 starts.

Some complain of the travel. Yeah it must be really tough to have to travel 2 or 3 times an entire spring for the regulars. Guess they are primidona’s now and forgot what it was like to play in the minors.

Of course it’s nice to see teams the Mets don’t play that often but with interleague play that is kind of no big deal anymore.

The one thing about spring training is that it brought you back to a simpler time and there is no reason to mess with putting all the teams in 1 massive complex. We don’t need a baseball version of Disney.

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