Gardner WebLog

Well, it’s finally here…the San Francisco Giants 2006 Minor League Spring Training Camp is underway.  The grass is greener, the clubhouse is smaller, and the players are all…bigger?  In all seriousness, one of the first things you notice walking around camp is how all guys come back either much bigger or smaller.  Few players keep the same body shape over the offseason.  Whether you’re gaining weight or losing it, at least you’re doing something– stasis in body mass is laziness.  When seeing old acquaintances from teams in years past, we must spend at least a minute or two talking about each other’s frame–’you’ve gotten a little bigger, man’ or ‘hey bud, you’re getting pretty lean.’  Then conversation moves to other topics:  jobs in offseason, girlfriends, the new Scottsdale Days Inn wireless internet (blazing fast), video game skills, or how big any other Giants farmhand has gotten in the offseason.  Then we move on.

In all honesty, seeing guys I played with and haven’t talked with in 6 months is great.  Not much has changed, and we all have the same anxious/nervous/confident/awestruck mindset.  In no other job does a company ask all its employees to come together for 4 weeks in sunny Arizona to practice their craft.  H & R Block doesn’t gather everyone up in mid December to psyche them up for the tax season and see who can rip through a worksheet in under 5 minutes.  We are about to be evaluated, conditioned, hurt, healed, lectured, taught the new new drug policy (emphasis on the second ‘new’), hurt again, healed again, and sent packing for some random city we’ve never been to (hopefully)– all in 4 weeks.  Everyone in the Giants organization is here, and wondering where we’ll be calling our girlfriends from in a month.

Each player, however, is also expected to start off with the usual griping about spring training.  ‘Yep, well I’m real excited about conditioning at 8 am every morning.’  Or ‘What do we get for lunch today–chicken or uh…chicken?!’  Unlike other clubs, the Giants pay to have each sprign training day catered, even at the minor league level.  I think most criticism is halfhearted, and that everyone appreciates that we’re being put up for free where it’s 80 degrees in February just to play a kid’s game.  We finish work every day at noon and people come make our beds for us.  I’ll eat chicken till I cluck for that lifestyle.

So here we all are, bumbling through semi-awkward conversations about the offseason, nervous about what group we’ll be assigned to for camp (roughly corresponding to where you’ll be sent), and re-learning to subsist on $20 a day living next to a huge luxury shopping mall where you can buy $1000 purses.  We are here living every young boy’s dream–playing on meticulously manicured green grass, pitching off perfectly shaped mounds, sliding into dirt watered down each morning specifically for us to…slide on (what drought?).  We’re here and ready to go.  So bring on the chicken–it’s time for Spring Traning.