Casa Grande resort recalls glory days as a mecca for spring training in Ariz.
CASA GRANDE — The round concrete and brick structure sits by itself in the middle of a now-barren dirt field. Two flights of stairs lead to a 12-foothigh patio surrounded with metal railings, and a circular roof provides shade. It’s not clear what the building’s purpose once was, though it looks like maybe the only survivor of some legendary playground. In a way, it is. Half a century ago, the building was an observation tower, with four baseball diamonds arranged around it like leaves on a clover. Each spring, players and coaches arrived mid-February, and major-leaguers like Willie Mays, Willie McCovey and Juan Marichal would work themselves into shape while eager minor-leaguers tried to land roster spots. And when they stopped to eat dinner and rest for the night, they did it at the 9-story hotel that rises a little like a mirage next door.
The Francisco Grande Resort thrives still, but now it depends on golf and soccer to support its unlikely place on the outskirts of Casa Grande. And
while thousands of visitors come to the Valley to enjoy spring training, not many know that the 15 teams playing in 10 stadiums from Mesa to Surprise can trace their roots to the hotel and training facility that opened in 1961.
Barnstorming beginning
Long before there was a Cactus League, there was the Orange League in California, a loose collection of early-1900s professional baseball clubs happy to escape the frigid February weather of their home bases.
On their train trips back home, owners would often schedule stops along the way where the teams would play in local ballparks, said baseball historian and Valley resident Rodney Johnson. The routes often took them across Arizona, where they would play in Phoenix or Tucson or Bisbee.
The pros were facing local ball clubs, so the games drew thousands despite the lopsided scores. It was a chance for Arizonans to see baseball teams they’d only read about – the Pirates, the White Sox, the Tigers, the Giants. And the barnstorming tours often helped baseball owners break even.
Post-World War II America, however, no longer supported such tours. Players didn’t want to travel for days by train, not when cross-country flights were becoming more available. And as TV infiltrated living rooms, baseball lost some of its novelty.
Teams still required warm winter weather to train, but owners sought permanent sites closer to home. Many went to Florida, including two of baseball’s most popular teams, the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers.
But two of the more enterprising, and stubborn, owners felt differently.
Bathed in history
Horace Stoneham had always enjoyed Arizona, so much so that he bought a home in Phoenix. But the legendary owner of the New York Giants may never have built his spring-training complex here if not for a timely stop in east Mesa.
One day in the mid-1940s, Stoneham stumbled across the Buckhorn Baths and Mineral Springs, a resort powered by the mineral springs on the property. As Stoneham settled into one of the many tubs of warm water, he thought about the athletes on his team. Not only would they love this kind of pampering, but the water could loosen tight muscles and get them in better shape for a coming season.
“And so one of the first seeds of the Cactus League was planted,” said Charlie Vascellaro, a baseball historian from Baltimore who each year makes a spring-training pilgrimage to the Valley and who researched the Buckhorn-baseball connection. “The league may well have started anyway, but the Buckhorn Baths really got Stoneham thinking about establishing a permanent training camp in Arizona.”
In1947, Stoneham and Cleveland Indians owner Bill Veeck, who owned a ranch in Tucson, agreed to bring their teams to Arizona in the spring. Every now and then the Indians would travel to Phoenix to play the Giants, and the Giants would return the favor in Tucson.
The games were hugely popular, Vascellaro said. A photograph he unearthed from one of the first games showed a jammed grandstand, with dozens of people sitting in foul territory.
The two teams were joined by the Chicago Cubs in 1952, a team that once trained on the beautiful but very inconvenient Catalina Island in California (the team and the island were owned by the Wrigleys of the chewing-gum fortune). In 1954, the Baltimore Orioles set up camp in Yuma, attaining what most people considered a sufficient number of teams to be called a league.
The Cactus League. eral miles away. And in 1961, after two years of construction, the $2 million resort greeted players for the first time — though they stayed in the dorms built in the tower’s shadow.
The resort relied on baseballian architecture both overt (the baseball-batshaped pool) and more subtle (a parking lot shaped like a catcher’s mitt). With spiral concrete stairs reminiscent of oldtime stadiums, and topped with a canopy mimicking a baseball cap, the Francisco Grande was ready to become spring training’s new star.
In the first game played at the stadium, those in the packed grandstand watched Willie Mays hit a towering home run off Gaylord Perry. A new era had begun. nessman Bob Lurie, and shortly thereafter Francisco Grande was sold to mining and oil concerns, according to newspaper reports at the time. Though the resort continued to operate, its reputation as a baseball destination was fading.
The Giants’ last spring training in Casa Grande would be in 1981; Lurie moved the team to Scottsdale for training the next year. From 1982-84, the resort was host to the California Angels, who then left it behind as well.
After that, it was game over. For the next two years, the fields were given over to football, when the Denver Gold and Arizona Wranglers of the short-lived USFL set up camp.
There is little left today to tell the tale. The baseball diamonds were scraped away years ago, and the former locker room now is the laundry room. When the stadium was demolished years ago, the resort donated the grandstand and lights to a local high school, said Tim Alie, the Francisco Grande’s general manager.
Youth soccer players now bunk in the dorms, participants of the Grande Sports Academy. The golf course hosts the Faldo Series Academy, a residential program for people serious about golf. Alie said the future may include a tennis academy, with courts built where the diamonds used to be.
Stoneham died in a Scottsdale nursing home in January1990, at age 86. The New York Times obituary called him “one of the last of the true baseball entrepreneurs,” and said he was “one of the last of the old breed of owners who were personally concerned with every detail of club business.”
The players that once called Francisco Grande home for six weeks out of the year still linger, but only in the vintage photos displayed in the lobby. Sealed under glass and hanging on a wall nearby are two home plates and a pitching rubber, well worn from a thousand pairs of cleats.
“Every now and then we’ll get a baseball buff who asks a few questions,” Alie said. “But most people have no idea what was here at one time.”
Reach the reporter at .craven@arizonarepublic.com.
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