Play Ball

Arizona has its share of frontier ghost towns. Baseball too has its deserted reminders of the past. In Chandler, Compadre Stadium sits empty and in decay where a once thriving Cactus League park hosted the Milwaukee Brewers. (more…)

Glendale hits a home run with Camelback Ranch, the city’s new spring training home for the Chicago White Sox and Los Angeles Dodgers. Experience the excitement of Opening Day as White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf and Dodger’s owner Frank McCourt explain the synergy between the teams and how they worked with the city to make the stadium a reality for baseball fans. (more…)

For more than one hundred years, journalists reporting for the Arizona Republic, and before that the Phoenix Gazette, have been covering the story of professional baseball in Arizona. When Horace Stoneham and Bill Veeck gave birth to the Cactus League in the 1940’s, the writers and photographers of the paper were there. And now thanks to a unique research partnership with the Arizona Republic and the Peoria Diamond Club, future generations of baseball fans will be able to relive those moments through stories and images captured as spring training news was being made. (more…)

As ASU prepares for the 2010 NCAA Baseball Regionals, it is hard to imagine the days when the school was known as Tempe State Teachers College and the baseball program was still scheduling games against local high schools. They have come a long way.

The school’s first baseball program began in 1907 when the college was known as Tempe Normal School. They compiled a 7-2 record for coach Fred Ayer who was also the school’s athletic director and the team’s pitching star. Their opponents were Mesa High (3-0); Phoenix Indian School (1-1); and the University of Arizona (3-1). (more…)

Developer Del Webb brought signature building projects and new home developments to Arizona in the boom years following World War II, but he also brought the New York Yankees to train in Phoenix in 1951. For the past three years, the Play Ball team has been working to contact anyone with a connection to his Arizona baseball story. Webb had no children so finding a living relative able to share the history has been impossible. But recently, thanks to a lead provided by new volunteer Jon Rosenthal, contact has been made to people in Sun City with information about Webb’s Yankees and a season when Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio warmed up in the Arizona sun before winning another World Series for the storied franchise later that year.

Kids who attend a special Kids Club event at CityCenter of CityNorth on June 17 will be treated to free baseball cards and a special magazine about the history of baseball cards donated by two of the biggest names in the game, Topps and the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

Topps, the official baseball card manufacturer of Major League Baseball, donated packs of its Topps Attax baseball card game, and the Hall of Fame gave copies of its member magazine, “Memories and Dreams,” dedicated to the history of baseball cards. (more…)

Visitors to the new, upscale retail and dining experience known as CityCenter of CityNorth in northeast Phoenix can get their spring training baseball fix from a series of banners that are now up along High Street. (more…)

By Jim Caple, ESPN

The Rockies will play the final Cactus League games at Hi Corbett Field this week and then move to Scottsdale next year. And when they do, spring training will become just a little more corporate.  (more…)

by Richard Ruelas
The Arizona Republic

Arizona had a lot to offer as a place for baseball teams to hold spring training: abundant sunshine, dry weather and hungry fans. But what cinched the deal, back in 1947, was the thought that the state would be more racially tolerant than Florida. (more…)

America’s only collection of Cactus League spring training baseball history is growing even as hundreds of baseball fans pack the Arizona Museum for Youth every day to walk through “Play Ball – The Cactus League Experience.” In less than two years, the collection has gone from a few objects donated by one or two supporters to more than 450 items, about 275 of which are on display in downtown Mesa.

Likewise, the collection of never-before-seen photographs chronicling the history of professional baseball in the desert has doubled in the past year from about 100 images to 200 photos. And if recent donations and loans from new fans are any indication, the collection is likely to double in size this year.
(more…)