The Cactus League’s origin story begins as a man with red hair and a wooden leg takes his seat at a Florida spring training game. Back then, Bill Veeck owned the minor-league Milwaukee Brewers. He came by his frizzy red hair naturally. But after he declined a deferment and joined the Marines during World War II, a recoiling antiaircraft gun shattered his leg while he served in the South Pacific.
Veeck liked to hang out with fans, and on that day in Florida, he hobbled over to the bleachers. Turns out, it was the Black section at Ocala’s segregated ballpark. This didn’t go over well. Almost immediately, a sheriff confronted Veeck and ordered him to move. The mayor came out, too. Veeck not only stayed put but sat with Black fans for the remainder of spring training. But the incident led to a decision that changed baseball history. Veeck vowed to take his team’s spring training out of Florida, and after buying the Cleveland Indians (now Guardians), he took the team to Tucson, not far from his ranch at the base of the Rincon Mountains. That was 1947.
Veeck was a notorious trickster who would later arrange for 3-foot-7-inch Eddie Gaedel to pinch-hit for his St. Louis Browns in 1951. But the Tucson move was no stunt. Veeck had long opposed segregation and quickly integrated the Indians organization, then helped break the American League’s color barrier when Larry Doby joined the team in July 1947. The New York Amsterdam News, a Black paper, called Veeck “the Abe Lincoln of baseball.”
Veeck had hoped to find a more tolerant atmosphere for Black players in Arizona. But he later wrote in his autobiography, “At Tucson, I discovered the bleachers weren’t segregated but the hotel was.” When Doby arrived for spring training in 1948, he couldn’t stay with his teammates at the Santa Rita Hotel and instead boarded witha local Black family.
Veeck’s move 75 years ago, combined with his persuading New York Giants owner Horace Stoneham to join him in the Sonoran Desert, launched the modern Cactus League. From that modest start, the league has grown into a juggernaut, generating an economic impact of $644 million in 2018. The 15-team Arizona circuit now rivals Florida’s more established Grapefruit League for spring training primacy.
The Cactus League is bigger and better than ever, with new ballparks offering all the modern conveniences today’s fans covet: grassy berms, luxury seats, microbrews and Sonoran dogs. And while spin rates, launch angles and exit velocities are the language of modern baseball, the classic Cactus League of cigar-chomping scouts and wooden grandstands is fading into the past, surviving at scattered places and in the stories of those who met the legends of the fall on spring days long ago.
When the old ballgame came to the Old Pueblo, it was big news, a boon to boosters as photos went out over the wires of ballplayers in an exotic locale of cactuses and cowboys and Indians, all just a long home run from Mexico. Tucson civic leader Roy Drachman greeted Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby with a sombrero as the man who had hit .424 in 1924 stepped off the Golden State Limited. Second baseman Joe Gordon, newly acquired from the New York Yankees, received a birthday cake with saguaro-shaped candles, and pitcher Bob Feller posed in a Plains Indian-style headdress as “Chief Fireball Feller.” But Feller, never an especially felicitous fellow, later complained that the desert air kept him from sweating freely; he blamed his spring training struggles on tight shoulders.
The Indians trained in a city park, at a ballpark later renamed Hi Corbett Field to honor the state legislator who helped bring the club to Tucson. It’s the Cactus League’s oldest landmark, and it’s hosted scores of Hall of Famers — Joe DiMaggio, Satchel Paige and Mickey Mantle among them.
But little survives of the 1937 ballpark that would become the home field of a succession of Tucson ballclubs: the Waddies, Cowboys, Lizards and Toros.
With eight archways and a dun-colored, Mission-style grandstand, Hi Corbett almost resembled a bullring. For decades, fans sat for free along an adobe outfield wall. By the time Hi Corbett was used as a location for 1989’s Major League — the poor man’s Bull Durham — it had undergone extensive renovations yet retained a Southwestern character thanks to a Pueblo Decostyle ticket office that looked like something from a Historic Route 66 motor court.
The Indians returned to Florida during the years the Colorado Rockies trained here, and additional modernizations eventually deprived Hi Corbett of whatever regional identity remained. In 2010, after 63 years, Tucson’s spring training tradition came to an end, but there’s still baseball at Hi Corbett, now the home field for the University of Arizona.
That isn’t the only vintage Cactus League ballpark to find new life in college baseball: Rival Arizona State University now plays at Phoenix Municipal Stadium. Built in 1964 and designed by noted architect Fred M. Guirey, Phoenix Muni is very much of its time. Fans still look out to Papago Park’s red rock outcroppings, and, reminiscent of Dodger Stadium, a midcentury, origami-style roof shades the grandstand. But if you’re a Giants fan, Phoenix Muni boasts a unique pedigree: Willie Mays hit the stadium’s first home run. And its steel light poles came from the Polo Grounds, the Giants’ storied Upper Manhattan ballpark.
Walking into Mesa’s Buckhorn Baths is the baseball equivalent of entering King Tut’s tomb. The Giants’ original Cactus League home seems little changed since the likes of Mays and Mel Ott first came in 1947. Out front, the prominent sign, with its stonework and neon stag’s head, hints at the Buckhorn’s glory days. In the lobby, there’s a 1920s cash register, complete with a marble-top drawer. Tim Boyle, a Mesa architect working on a proposed project that could preserve the Buckhorn’s most historic Pueblo Revival structures while adding new residences and a hotel, punches a key. With a sharp ring, the “No Sale” tab pops up in the register window.
“Still works,” Boyle says.
“Yeah, it still works,” replies Dan Gann, the property’s caretaker, whose mother, Myrtis, spent 41 years at the Buckhorn.
The property dates to the mid-1930s, when Ted and Alice Sliger purchased some open desert east of Mesa. They added gas pumps and a small store and eventually opened a Greyhound bus stop and a wildlife museum where Ted, an accomplished taxidermist, displayed his work. An inveterate builder, he incorporated the countless metates, crystals and chunks of petrified wood that customers traded for meals and massages into the Buckhorn’s stone walls and fireplaces, creating a complex that’s part folk art, part 20th century cliff dwelling.
“Ted was constantly adding wings and outbuildings,” Boyle says. “He did stuff for fun, just stuck things in the mortar — antlers and ax handles and gun barrels. Whatever was around.”
Drilling a well in 1939, Ted hit hot springs rich with rejuvenating minerals. In a time when ballplayers worked other jobs in the offseason and invariably reported to spring training out of shape, the baths became a big part of the Giants’ training regimen. Stories at the time described how the mineral waters were used to “cook out muscular kinks” and “melt away excess poundage.”
With three sets of keys jangling, Gann leads a walk through the Buckhorn, which, cluttered by leopard-print furniture with wagon-wheel armrests and lamps featuring saddle-shaped bases, resembles the prop room for a Wes Anderson movie. He continues into the dark labyrinth of baths and massage rooms where Giants players soaked in concrete tubs and got rubdowns on Naugahyde-covered tables. He pauses where Myrtis slipped and broke her hip. “It happened at the end of May 1999,” Gann says as he picks up a calendar. “See this calendar? It’s on June. The last page they ripped out was May. The baths closed right after that.”
By then, the Giants, who had moved their regular-season home to San Francisco in 1958, were long gone, having decamped in 1962 to a Casa Grande training facility with a Rat Pack-style high-rise hotel and a bat-shaped pool. But thanks to two teams and an association with the Chicago Cubs that began in 1952, Mesa has remained a Cactus League star.
Dilworth Brinton Jr. grew up in a Cactus League dynasty that included his father, who was instrumental in the Cubs coming to Mesa, and late brother Robert, the onetime league president. He’s a longtime member of the Mesa HoHoKams, the volunteer organization that for decades has supported Mesa spring training. As kids, Brinton and his brothers sold programs and pencils outside Rendezvous Park, the 1895 ballpark and original friendly confines for the Cubs in Mesa.
Brinton remembers helping out during a steak fry, a spring training tradition with a menu of grilled rib-eyes or T-bones, plus bread and cinnamon rolls cooked in Dutch ovens over mesquite. His father tasked Brinton, age 8, with carrying shovelfuls of glowing red coals to keep the fires hot: “I thought, You give a boy a shovel and say, ‘Go play in the fire for hours?’ This is service? I’ll do that any day.”
The Cubs now play in Sloan Park, among the Cactus League’s better latter-day stadiums. It’s an homage to Wrigley Field, with bricks similar to those used for the walls at Wrigley and a roofline and light standards inspired by the historic ballpark. It’s the Cubs’ third Mesa home: Rendezvous Park came down in 1976, and the Oakland Athletics now play at Hohokam Stadium, Mesa’s second stadium by that name. Brinton laments the loss of Cactus League landmarks, but get him going, and spring training’s past comes alive in his stories of guarding Ernie Banks’ Cadillac and meeting Ty Cobb.
Brinton and his father were working the gate at Rendezvous when an old man came up and presented a card from Major League Baseball that entitled him to enter any ballpark. It was Cobb, he of the fiery temper, knee-high slides and 4,189 career hits. Initially, maybe as a tease, Brinton’s father denied Cobb entrance, saying that his real name was Tyrus and the card didn’t match. “So, Ty yells, ‘Well, I’m the same guy!’ ” Brinton recalls. “Dad lets him in and says, ‘Now, Dilworth, I want you to shake hands with Mr. Cobb. He’s a very famous ballplayer, and you will now be able to say you shook his hand.’ So, I shook Ty Cobb’s hand. There aren’t very many people who are still around that can say that.”
As of this writing, pitchers and catchers won’t report to spring training for another three months, but there’s still baseball at Scottsdale Stadium, where the Surprise Saguaros lead the Scottsdale Scorpions 1-0 in an Arizona Fall League game.
Built in 1992 and later renovated, the stadium sits in the heart of Scottsdale at the same spot as the original Scottsdale Stadium, a 3,000-seat ballpark with a plankwood grandstand that, fittingly for “The West’s Most Western Town,” resembled an old livery stable. Restaurants and bars awaited a short walk away, and — because baseball was always a schmoozy, boozy game — Scottsdale emerged as the watering hole for Cactus League fans, players and team executives alike. A few old-school places, including the Coach House, survive. But the Pink Pony — where, on a given night, you might have spotted Hall of Famers, has-beens or Harry Caray ensconced in the wraparound booths — closed in 2009.
“I started eating at the Pink Pony in 1959 or 1960,” says Don Carson, who opened Don & Charlie’s, his own Cactus League classic, in 1981. “Sometimes I would go in after a game when I was 16, just to see the guys carrying on. Guys like Dizzy Dean. But after [owner] Charlie Briley passed away, things changed. Things change. Then somebody else bought it and tried to reopen, but they changed the whole character. What do they say at Disney? The pixie dust was gone.”
Columnist and undying Cubs fan George Will once called Don & Charlie’s baseball’s “family den.” But in 2019, it also closed, to make way for a hotel. With that, Scottsdale lost not just a restaurant but also a reliquary. Carson had assembled a remarkable collection of memorabilia — signed baseballs, jerseys, gloves and bats — that he got straight from the players, not dealers. Mays even autographed a tablecloth. But Carson needed 10 years to get his picture of Mays and Henry Aaron signed.
“Willie was easy — I’ve known Willie for 40 years — but I only met Henry Aaron once,” Carson says. “So, the picture is sitting around and sitting around, and I finally called up [former baseball commissioner and Milwaukee Brewers owner] Bud Selig and said, ‘Bud, I’ve got this picture from the ’50s of Henry and Willie. I’d like Henry to sign it.’ I sent the picture to Bud, and, lo and behold, Henry signed. Later, when they dedicated Bud’s statue [at Miller Park, now American Family Field, in Milwaukee], Henry was there and I got to thank him. I just wanted the picture for enjoyment, not to sell it.”
Carson has no illusions about the changes that have come to spring training. Players with nine-figure contracts zealously guard their privacy, while fans are more aggressive, whether for autographs or with cellphones poised to capture potential viral moments. Maybe the pixie dust is gone. But at 77, Carson is thinking about a comeback. If hope springs eternal, it’s never springier than at spring training.
“Three weeks before we closed, someone stole 39 baseballs signed by Hall of Famers,” Carson says. “But I still have 800 baseballs in storage. I can’t wait to break them out again.”