Is spring training real?

These are the times that try baseball writers’ souls.

Most of us here sporting authors are pretty accomplished at making something out of nothing; but only a fraction of us face the special challenges of the baseball writer scribbling about nothing.

Or spring training, as it is called.

Spring training consists of 10 days of conditioning of superbly-marbled baseball flesh followed by 32 — more or less — exhibition games which have about as much significance as a burp in a tornado. And are about as exciting as listening to a blade of grass grow.

It has been with us for years. It will be with us for years to come. Why?

There are a lot of perfectly sound people who maintain that baseball itself — the national pastime, the long season, the slow death — is a meaningless child’s game. What are we to think of training to play it, when losing and winning are about as important as picking your teeth.

We are told by the baseball owners, when they take time off from whacking their tambourines, that spring training is held, at a desperate financial loss to them, because it is a tradition which the fans demand — like sending flowers on Mother’s Day or paying 20 grand to bury your uncle.

Were the owners simply to tell their tigers to get off their collective butts and report on such and such a date in condition to play major league baseball, they would be tarred and feathered, or so the owners estimate.

Actually, spring training is the greatest device for stealing advertising ever devised by the ingenuity of American businessmen, and the owners are not about to forget it. It is conducted, not for the fan, who usually couldn’t care less, but for the argus-eyed ladies of the counting house.

While other legitimate businessmen pay space rates through the nose, plus a healthy 15 percent commission to the ad agency which places their message, the tycoons of baseball continue to practice their amiable con game of getting years of free space about nothing from newspapers. Which, for some reason, go along with the con.

Newspapers are not notably glassy-eyed about matters pertaining to revenue, but they stand in relation to the club owners like Floyd Patterson to Sonny Liston, or Trilby to Svengali.

There is absolutely no relation between spring training and season performance that anyone I know has ever discovered. As Chicago Cubs manager Bob Kennedy said here the other day, no amount of spring training is going to change a .250 hitter into a .350 hitter or make a 20-game winner out of a pitcher who doesn’t have the ability to win more than 10.

If any doubt existed about the need for spring training, World War II killed it. In those days the good players were in the services. The others did not go to Florida or Arizona for six weeks of salubrious suntanning. They trained in the north, and for only a few days. And it didn’t make any difference at all.

Meanwhile, the real victim of this dear sweet swindle is the baseball writer. While the players are cranking up their arms and tendons at exhibition games in the Cactus or Grapefruit Leagues, the writers are squeezing the last drop of blood out of their adjectives. And it shows. I can tell you.

For want of anything to write about they are driven to perfect poetic frenzies. In this way they are not unlike D.H. Lawrence and other forcedgrowth poets.

When the regular season arrives, the authors are so depleted that they are driven to simple, journeyman prose to explain the games that count, which isn’t a bad thing, after all.

Down here Arizona way it’s so bad that one enterprising youth has taken to calling Willie McCovey “SuperMac” in his stories on the basis of his spring training performances. Which is rather like letting a guy into the Hall of Fame for what he does in a batting cage.

But it’s all traditional as hell, or something.

This column originally appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle March 25, 1964.