What it means
Everywhere else, spring training is six weeks of split squads and pitchers working on a changeup. In Scottsdale it is a season on the civic calendar, the way “the Open” means a week in February and “monsoon” means a stretch of summer. A hotel manager will tell you a rate is “spring training pricing.” A neighbor will ask if you are “doing spring training this year,” meaning going to a game, any game, probably on a weekday with a lawn ticket and a beer.
The thing itself is Major League Baseball’s preseason, played here in the Cactus League: fifteen clubs in ten ballparks around the Valley, two of them in Scottsdale. The San Francisco Giants play at Scottsdale Stadium, two blocks from the bars of Old Town. The Arizona Diamondbacks and Colorado Rockies share Salt River Fields at Talking Stick, ten minutes east on Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community land. The spring training event guide covers the parks and the tickets; the field manual covers how to do it well.
Where you’ll meet it
On every resort rate card from mid-February to the end of March, in the traffic on Osborn Road at 12:30 on a Tuesday, on the Pink Pony’s walls, where seven decades of ballplayers have left their marks, and in the sudden appearance of orange and black on Scottsdale Road. Spring training is also the season that ends high season: when the last game is played, rates fall and the city exhales.
Where the word came from
The phrase is baseball’s own, older than Arizona statehood, and Arizona borrowed it whole in 1947. That spring Bill Veeck brought the Cleveland Indians to Tucson, partly to get his Black players out of the segregated towns that hosted Florida’s Grapefruit League, and talked Horace Stoneham’s New York Giants into Phoenix so his club would have someone to play. The first game was March 8, 1947, at what is now Hi Corbett Field; the Indians won 3-1. Arizona’s sportswriters started calling the circuit the Cactus League once the Baltimore Orioles made it a real league in 1954.
Scottsdale got into it two years later. Volunteers built a wooden ballpark on Osborn Road, and the Orioles trained there in 1956, followed by the Red Sox (1959 to 1965, Ted Williams’ last springs), the Cubs (1967 to 1978) and the A’s (1979 to 1983). The Giants moved over from Phoenix in 1984, swapping parks with Oakland, and never left. The Scottsdale Charros, the businessmen’s club founded in 1961 to host the Red Sox, have run the hospitality side ever since; their story is in the Charros guide.
The modern shape of the season dates from two buildings. Scottsdale voters approved an $8.4 million bond in November 1989 to replace the 3,000-seat wooden stadium, and the new one, by HOK Sport, the Camden Yards firm, opened on March 12, 1992 with room for about 12,000. Then on February 11, 2011, the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community opened Salt River Fields, a $100 million, two-team complex designed by HKS, the first big-league spring facility on tribal land, and pulled the Diamondbacks and Rockies up from Tucson.
What it is not
Spring training is not the regular season, and the standings mean nothing; veterans get three at-bats and a cart ride home. It is also not quite the same thing as the Cactus League, which is the Arizona half of spring training (Florida has the Grapefruit League), though in Scottsdale the two phrases are interchangeable. And it is not the Arizona Fall League, the October prospect league that uses the same parks with a fraction of the crowd.
The fine print
The numbers the league publishes are large and come from the league: 15 teams, 10 ballparks in seven cities, about 229 games in five weeks, more than 1.7 million fans through the gates and a claimed $764 million in annual economic impact. The 2027 season opens February 19. Scottsdale Stadium holds about 12,000; Salt River Fields about 11,000 fixed and lawn seats, with a record crowd of 14,035 for a Diamondbacks-Cubs game on March 16, 2019.
Two dates in the record are argued over. The Giants’ first Scottsdale spring is given as 1982 by the Charros’ own history and by the San Francisco Chronicle, and as 1984 by the stadium’s history, the Cactus League and most other accounts; this site uses 1984 and assumes 1982 dates the handshake rather than the first camp. And 1966 is the one spring since 1956 with no big-league tenant at Scottsdale Stadium, after the Red Sox left and before the Charros landed the Cubs, which is why “nearly every spring” is the honest phrasing.
The season has also stopped once. On March 12, 2020 Major League Baseball halted spring training mid-afternoon as the pandemic arrived, and Scottsdale learned what March without baseball costs a sales-tax city. The Giants’ current lease runs to 2044, so the word should keep its local meaning for a while.