What it means
In Scottsdale, the Cactus League is what the city becomes in March. Fifteen Major League teams, half of baseball, play a month of exhibition games in ten ballparks around the Valley, and two of the ten are here or next door: Scottsdale Stadium, where the Giants have trained since 1984, a short walk from every Old Town hotel; and Salt River Fields, where the Diamondbacks and Rockies share a complex on the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community east of the Loop 101.
Locals say “Cactus League” and “spring training” interchangeably, and both mean the same month-long mood: lawn seats, afternoon beer, Giants fans from the Bay Area filling the patios, hotel rates at their winter peak. “Cactus League traffic” explains Osborn Road at four o’clock. The full guide to the games, the tickets and the two parks is at Cactus League Spring Training, with a practical field guide alongside it.
Where you’ll meet it
Late February through March, at the two ballparks and in every bar in Old Town; on the stadium signage; in the Charros’ name, since that club of local businessmen runs the Scottsdale games and gives the money away; and at the Pink Pony, which has fed ballplayers since the 1950s.
Where the word came from
Florida had a Grapefruit League before Arizona had any teams at all, and the name was waiting to be answered. Arizona’s chance came in 1947, when Bill Veeck, the showman who owned the Cleveland Indians, moved his club’s camp from Florida to Tucson, urged on by Tucson state senator Hiram Corbett. Veeck’s reasons included the segregated Florida towns his Black players had to live in; Arizona was not integrated either, but it was his own choice of ground. He needed someone to play, and talked the New York Giants into Phoenix. The two clubs met on March 8, 1947, at Tucson’s Randolph Park, a 3 to 1 game that the sources, entertainingly, do not agree on: one has Cleveland winning, another the Giants.
Two teams are not a league. The Cubs came to Mesa in 1952, and when the Baltimore Orioles arrived in 1954 the sportswriters had four clubs and a name: the Cactus League, the obvious desert answer to Florida’s citrus. SABR’s Arizona chapter dates the usage to that Orioles season. No single writer has ever been credited with the coinage, and nobody has claimed it.
Scottsdale entered in 1956, when the Orioles moved from Yuma to the new Scottsdale Stadium on Osborn Road; the Red Sox followed in 1959, bringing Ted Williams, and then the Cubs and the A’s between 1967 and 1983 before the Giants settled in for good in 1984. The Scottsdale Charros, founded in 1961, took over running the games and have done so since. The league grew from four teams to eight in the 1990s, then to fifteen after the Diamondbacks were born in 1998 and the Valley’s cities began building stadiums to lure Florida clubs west. Salt River Fields, opened in 2011, was the first spring complex built on tribal land.
What it is not
The Cactus League is not the Arizona Fall League, which uses the same parks in October for prospects. It is not a league in the standings sense; the exhibition records mean nothing. And “Cactus League” does not include Tucson anymore, though Tucson is where it began: the last big-league camp left the Old Pueblo in 2010.
The fine print
The numbers justify the civic fuss. A W. P. Carey School of Business study at Arizona State University estimated that the 2023 season generated $710.2 million in economic activity for the state and supported 5,893 jobs, most of it from out-of-state visitors who come specifically for the games and stay in hotels that pay bed tax. The Cactus League Association, the nonprofit of host cities and the tribal community, commissions those studies and lobbies the legislature to keep the stadiums funded; the teams, for their part, have learned that a city will build a complex to keep them.
Scottsdale’s stake is smaller than Mesa’s or Glendale’s but older. Scottsdale Stadium, rebuilt in 1992 and renovated since, is the only Cactus League park you can walk to from a downtown hotel, and the city has kept the Giants on long leases to protect that. The Charros’ arrangement is unusual too: a private civic club operates the city’s ballpark concessions and spring games and hands the proceeds to schools and charities.
The historical record has thin spots. The exact first printed use of “Cactus League” has not been found; 1954 is the year SABR’s historians settle on, and earlier claims (including one, repeated in a previous version of this entry, that Texas minor leaguers used the phrase in 1909) could not be confirmed and have been dropped. The 1947 game’s score is agreed, its winner is not. Treat the founding story as Veeck’s, told mostly by Veeck.