It all worked out for Doug Galloway.
First, his team won the 2019 World Series. Then, a couple of months leave from his job at the U.S. State Department overlapped with spring break at Longwood University, in Farmville, Va., where his son Rob is studying communications.
This giant-size Washington Nationals team logo greets fans outside FitTeam Ballpark of the Palm Beaches. Photo Credit: Tom Stieghorst
The next thing you know, Rob is posing in front of the giant-size Washington Nationals W that sits outside FitTeam Ballpark of the Palm Beaches. Father and son have booked a five-day stay at the Hotel Biba in West Palm Beach and are pumped about seeing Nationals' ace pitcher Max Sherzer throw the first few innings of his 2020 campaign at the world champions' spring training ballpark.
It worked out for Galloways in another way. They scheduled their trip for the first week in March, before concerns about the Covid-19 virus ended exhibition games for fans. They were two of 3,753 people on March 3 to see the Nationals defeat the Baltimore Orioles.
With the shutdown of spring training on March 12, Florida lost one of the drivers of tourism in the middle part of the state.
Jorge Pesquera, CEO of Discover the Palm Beaches, estimates that last year's spring training produced 53,800 paid room nights and generated $70 million in economic impact.
"It's not just the fans, but also teams and coaches," Pasquera said. "These are people who have a lot of spending power."
This year, the impact will be diminished but not zero. For example, the Nationals played 19 games, about two-thirds of their 30-game Florida schedule.
Perhaps no area benefits more from spring training than Palm Beach County, where the Nationals and Houston Astros split time at FitTeam Ballpark, and the St. Louis Cardinals and Miami Marlins share space at Roger Dean Stadium in Jupiter.
But other areas of Florida also profit from spring baseball, with 15 teams getting into shape at 12 custom-built facilities.
Whether it is the New York Yankees in Tampa, the Orioles in Sarasota or the Detroit Tigers in Lakeland, an annual surge in hotel room visits and visitor spending helps buoy the months of February and March in a dozen cities.
Out-of-state attendees whose primary trip purpose was spring training, like the Galloways, spend an average of 8.5 nights in the state, according to Visit Florida.
Others who vacation in Florida take in a spring training game even though they might not be fans of the teams playing. Chris Morris grew up in Cleveland and now lives on Nantucket in Massachusetts, where he operates a catering business, but nevertheless was attending the Nationals-Orioles game with his wife in West Palm Beach.
"We're escaping the winter," said Morris, who had secured an Airbnb in Pompano Beach for the week and drove up for the game.
For others, spring training is a repeat experience. "It's an annual thing we do," said Donna Brown, a CAT scan technician in Pikesville, Md., who visits her sister and cousin each year to take in an Orioles game or two.
Donna Brown, a CAT scan technician from Pikesville, Md., comes to a Baltimore Orioles spring training game annually. Photo Credit: Tom Stieghorst
While spring training was never big in northern Florida cities such as Jacksonville because of its relatively colder weather, it used to extend into southern Florida. Back in the 1960s, the Orioles played in Miami and the Yankees in Fort Lauderdale.
But as players earned more it became harder to coax them on the longer bus trips needed to reach those cities. When the Yankees decamped to Tampa in 1996, the Orioles moved up to Fort Lauderdale, before leaving it, too, in 2009 for Sarasota.
Baseball fans in South Florida have been without spring training for a decade. The recent opening of the Brightline express train, which takes fans from both Miami and Fort Lauderdale stations without a car trip, is making spring baseball a little more reachable for the state's biggest population center.
Now, with the start of the regular season postponed indefinitely, spring training may have been the only baseball on offer during the 2020 season.