Back when there was nothing to do but baseball, I would set up my pitch-back, turn on the transistor radio, listen to Ernie Harwell and George Kell and pretend to be Chico Fernandez fielding ground balls or Al Kaline shagging flies, or, maybe, even Purnell Goldy, the Tigers’ no-name, rookie phenom for a few weeks in 1963.

When you’re a kid you don’t think too far ahead, so a new baseball season sneaks up on you. Then, one day you notice the last of the snow melting and the softening ground releasing the rich damp smell of wet dirt, leather and cowhide.

That would be the time to find the old balls, covers long gone; wrap them with electrical tape, pound nails in the bats cracked from the previous summer, saddle soap the mitt, sleep on it and dream of making “The Bigs,” surprising everybody like Purnell Goldy did back in ‘63.

Nowadays, many years after all the sandlot games, the little league games, the junior and senior knothole games, and the many years of playing softball it’s not the smell of thawing earth rising from my backyard that turns my thoughts to baseball, it’s spring training in Florida.

My wife and I, for the third year, were among the growing number of fans filling the ballparks of the 15 Major League teams who call Florida home for six weeks of the year. Nick Gandy, director of communications of the Florida Sports Foundation, a non-profit organization that promotes sports in Florida, said last year’s Grapefruit League set an average attendance record of 6,640 per game for 215 games. This year looks the same.

Gandy said the average total attendance of more than 1.5 million a year contributes some $752.3 million to Florida’s economy according to a 2009 study conducted by the Bonn Marketing Research Group.  

On Thursday, March 24, 93 percent of all stadium seats were sold. The Phillies and Red Sox had standing-room only tickets available. Gandy said the Red Sox will move next year to a new stadium that increases seating from 7,700 to 12,000.

Forty-eight percent of these fans are from out-of-state and 23 percent come specifically for the baseball. This is big business and it has not gone unnoticed. The Cactus League, the other spring training league in Arizona, recently lured away the Cincinnati Reds and Cleveland Indians. They now have 15 teams too.

My wife and I saw three games in our week-long stay. Watching our team, the Detroit Tigers, also evokes memories of her father hitting her fly balls down at the school-yard and of him second guessing Tiger managers as they watched the games together on television.

Others come for the same reasons: to recall the past and bask in the slow pace of a game in which you can have a conversation, or take a nap while the pitcher picks up the rosin bag, knocks the dirt off his cleats, straightens his uniform, pulls on the beak of his cap, gets the sign from the catcher, shakes it off, goes into the stretch, looks to first, spits over his shoulder, steps off the mound to collect his thoughts and goes through the whole process again before delivering the pitch to the batter. Slow is good, sometimes. Especially, when it’s 82 degrees and you’re sitting next to your honey while the breeze from the gulf rustles the palm trees and the ospreys feed their young nestled in wooden nests on top of the stadium lights.

A bonus to the game atmosphere is the people you meet. Like the group of 14 raucous but engaging men who sat next to us one game. Joe is from Buffalo. He was born in 1939. He was nine in 1948, when one his two favorite teams, the Cleveland Indians, last won a pennant. His other team? The Dodgers. His favorite players growing up? Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby. One broke the color barrier in the National League, the other broke it in the American League.

Joe has been coming to spring training for 11 years. His passion for baseball has rubbed off on his family. His group of 14 includes an uncle, a brother-in-law, some nephews, cousins and close friends. They flew down from New York City, Syracuse, Buffalo and Frankenmuth, Michigan. They saw eight games in five days, catching both afternoon and evening games, shuttling between Kissimmee, Sarasota, Lakeland, Clearwater and Tampa.

Today, I’m back at work, it’s opening day and the Tigers play the dreaded Yankees. I’ll be listening to Jim Price go on and on about “pitchability” and describing a ball rocketing off a hitter’s bat like a “scalded dog.”  And, I’ll be thinking about the dreams of youth and maybe, I’ll crack the window to see if I can get a whiff of baseball rising from the rich, wet earth.

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