Is MLB’s spring training too long? | Baseball Bar-B-Cast
Yahoo Sports senior MLB analysts Jake Mintz and Jordan Shusterman discuss if baseball’s annual passage has become too much for today’s game — and how shortening it could be bad for some. Hear the full conversation on “Baseball Bar-B-Cast” podcast - and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.
Video Transcript
JAKE MINTZ: Is spring training too long. Talk to a lot of people about this when I was down in Florida. And the consensus that I got is why does this need to be six or seven weeks long. Pitchers nowadays are so built up and ready to go by the time they get to camp that they don't need all that time to be ready to throw five, six innings in a start. Back in the day players would show up to spring training bellies full of beer and use that time to work their way into shape.
Now people are showing up to spring ready to rock. And so all we're doing by having such a long spring training is increasing the likelihood that we're going to get catastrophic season altering injuries during that time.
JORDAN SHUSTERMAN: It's just a really hard thing. This is again such a massively important question for the entire health and existential nature of the sport is how do we keep pitchers healthy. And I don't know if the length of spring training is necessarily the number one thing related to that. But I hear you, it is interesting.
JAKE MINTZ: But the dynamic at play here is the teams in communities are making so much money off of spring training. So spring training is like a multi $100 million endeavor for Florida and Arizona. There are local areas in these places that are like financially, economically reliant on an enormous wave of people coming down there every February and March. And shortening that by a week is a huge financial punch to the gut. That's certainly worth noting as well.