Baseball spring training: The facts, from history to cheap seats

Spring training is when players shed the winter rust by limbering up on warm, sun-baked diamonds, sign autographs galore, and provide hope that this may be their team’s year. As preseason games between major-league teams begin on Saturday, here are a few facts to give you some background on spring ball.

Cheap seats

Darron Cummings/AP
San Francisco Giants pitchers and catchers stretch during a spring training baseball workout, Wednesday, Feb. 22, in Scottsdale, Ariz.

$5, Boston Red Sox and San Francisco Giants. These are on the lawn beyond the outfield fence. A number of clubs offer lawn and berm seating areas as a casual, low-cost viewing option. The Giants also have the most expensive ticket in spring training at $52.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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