I've been going to spring training ever since 1975, when my pal Mike Shatzkin and I made our first excursion from New York to Fort Lauderdale to watch the Yankees. Glimpsing pinstripe-clad heroes in person — a month before the team arrived in the Bronx — was magical. With snow still on the ground back home, it was as if we were tricking both Mother Nature and the Baseball Gods. Florida's grass was green, the sky brilliant blue, and even the baseballs were a brighter white than you'd expect (because during the regular season they're rubbed with mud to remove the shine, but practice balls in spring training don't always get that treatment).

Baseball is rooted in optimism, especially in spring, as teams and players start with clean slates. They play on fields of dreams where ya gotta believe because it ain't over til it's over.

Years later, on a trip to Phoenix, I drove to Papago Park, with its scenic sandstone buttes circling a half-dozen baseball fields — the training site at the time of the Oakland A's. Since players weren't due for another few days, the place was quiet, except for the chugging of mowers in the outfields and small tractors smoothing the infields.

Off to one side was a feature unique to training camps: a long mound with enough pitching rubbers to allow five players to throw at once. However, only one was in use. Jerry Blevins, a lefty relief specialist, had traveled from snowy Ohio on his own dime to get a jump on what he hoped would be an improved season.

That's what I like best about spring training venues: they are homes for hope.

Blevins stopped to chat, seemingly as impressed that a "fan" was on hand as I was that a Big Leaguer would care to converse. "I had to come early," he explained. "I couldn't stand throwing any longer in the high school gym."

Another time I went poking around the Giants facility in Scottsdale, again knowing it was a bit too early to see players in action. There were a few cars in the lot but not a soul in sight until I walked around a brick building and peered through a chain link fence. Playing catch with an equipment manager was Brandon Crawford, the all-star shortstop. He was wearing black shorts, a white tee-shirt and had his hair in a ponytail. "Hey, Brandon. Big fan," I said, immediately feeling foolish. He walked over and explained that he had just purchased a house nearby. "Playing catch loosens my arm and my mind," he noted, as I pressed my phone against the fence to snap a photo.

I've had many encounters like these and collected numerous anecdotes. In other circumstances, it might be impressive, but for those of us who go to spring training, it's actually routine.

Baseball historians tend to argue about almost everything, so it's not surprising that the origins of spring training are in dispute. Some point to the 1870 season, when the Cincinnati Red Stockings and Chicago White Stockings held joint practices in New Orleans to get in shape. Eighteen years later, the Washington Capitals conducted a four-day camp in Jacksonville, Florida. But the unofficial birthplace of spring training is Hot Springs, Arkansas, where multiple teams gathered beginning in 1894 to play an organized schedule of pre-season games. Florida's Grapefruit League was formed in 1910. Arizona entered the spring picture in 1947, when the Cleveland Indians trained in Tucson and occasionally played the New York Giants, who were camped in Phoenix.

Having visited most of the current spring training sites, I've concluded that Arizona provides the best spring baseball experience. While the Cactus and Grapefruit Leagues each currently host 15 Major League teams, Florida's venues are spread across both coasts, with drive-times between them taking as much as two-and-a-half hours. In Arizona, action is confined to the Phoenix metroplex, and transit rarely takes more than 30 minutes — making it possible to attend a game in the afternoon before hitting the pool or pub and then taking in another game at night.

A lot has changed in recent years. Major League owners — buoyed by tax breaks and other perks in Arizona and Florida — came to see spring training as a profit center rather than a pre-season expense. That led to bigger, less intimate stadiums, and exorbitant prices for hotdogs and beer. Many clubs entered the touring business, encouraging fans to travel en masse to spring venues. Even the players changed their approach, hiring personal trainers over the winter in order to arrive at camp physically fit — and contract-ready.

For me, the way to preserve the pure simplicity of spring baseball has been to visit Arizona earlier and earlier each year, often skipping the games altogether. The first days, when players report and go through organized drills, are more intriguing to me than actual games in which the scores don't count. It's a time when fans can still converse with players and coaches and the crack of balls against bats isn't drowned out by tour bus engines.

When ballplayers and diehard fans think of spring, we're not focused on calendar dates or meteorology. It's about renewal of body and spirit.

Hall of Fame great Rogers Hornsby, the only player to ever hit 40 home runs and bat .400 in the same season (1922), once said: "People ask me what I do in the winter when there's no baseball. I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring."

(c) Peter Funt. This essay originally appeared in Phi Kappa Phi Forum.