By Brian Costa | The Wall Street Journal
For decades, baseball’s traditional spring training home was Florida. But from the window seat of a descending plane, it is hard to miss the many baseball diamonds that now dot the Valley of the Sun.
Fifteen teams–half of Major League Baseball–hold their spring training in the Cactus League, all within a 25-mile radius of downtown Phoenix. As recently as 2008, only nine teams were here. But since then, three teams have moved north from Tucson and another three have migrated from Florida. The shift has made greater Phoenix the epicenter of baseball in March, leaving Florida teams increasingly isolated.
To measure the difference in convenience, The Wall Street Journal conducted an experiment: How many Cactus League games could one writer catch a glimpse of in the time it took another simply to drive between two random Grapefruit League sites?
