My spring break trip to the Sunshine State for MLB Spring Training and the World Baseball Classic changed the way I view my favorite sport. Florida, I wasn’t familiar with your game.
The Miami Marlins and Tampa Bay Rays, Florida’s two MLB teams, perennially lag behind the rest of the league in attendance. What a shame that is. Florida is clearly crazy about the greatest sport on Earth.
From the retirement communities of the Southwest Floridian coast to the Hispanic and Latino-heavy Miami area, each of Florida’s demographically diverse regions finds its own passion in the game.
It was clear from the moment my dad and I stepped off the plane in Florida that the state was ready for Grapefruit League Spring Training baseball. Fans of franchises across the eastern U.S. flocked down south for early looks at their teams. Hats and t-shirts adorned with the logos of the Phillies, Astros, Blue Jays and more abounded — signaling Florida’s status as baseball’s Mecca, and I was making my pilgrimage alongside the others.
After the early-morning flight from Connecticut, it was straight to JetBlue Park at Fenway South, the Spring Training home of my Boston Red Sox. We had tickets to the game against the visiting Philadelphia Phillies, but entry to the complex was free. Only a crudely simple security check stood between us and the Red Sox’s major and minor-league Spring Training invitees.
Fans arrived as soon as 10 a.m. — prior to a 1 p.m. game — to watch the players take batting practice and run fielding drills. Children too young to remember Boston’s 2018 World Series championship swarmed even the Sox’s minor-league players — whose names they had no way of knowing — clamoring for autographs.
The Philadelphia fans filed in closer to game time, and we entered the gates. Here, baseball’s return was celebrated with live music, beers that quickly warmed in the Florida heat and the first Fenway Franks of the year.
And the people of Fort Myers flocked here, the void left by the distance from their Northern teams now filled: The Maine-born Florida resident, the retired Rhode Islander, the old security guard who — upon learning I was from his home state — regaled me with tales of working at the old Hartford, Conn. Civic Center, breaking up scrums between Hartford Whalers and Boston Bruins fans.
This little colony of New England, hundreds of miles to the region’s south. It was beautiful.
It was just over two hours from Fort Myers to colorful Miami, though it seemed a world away. While JetBlue Park welcomed a crowd of predominantly older white people, my dad and I must have been the only non-Latinos in the Marlins’ loan Depot Park that night, set to take in Nicaragua and Venezuela’s bout in the World Baseball Classic.
There was a live band fueling an impromptu dance party on the concourse. There was a dancer with an elaborate headdress showing off in front of a pack of drummers. And there was more passion in that building than any MLB fanbase could dream of.
Miami, which is home to large portions of the Nicaraguan and Venezuelan diasporas in the U.S., showed out. Thousands of fans, rife with patriotic fervor, bobbed up and down for every hit.
That night’s crowd outdid any I’ve seen at an MLB ballpark. I’ve exited Fenway Park triumphantly over a sweep of the New York Yankees, “Dirty Water” and “Tessie” blaring, sulked my way out of Yankee Stadium among the jeering Bronx faithful after the inverse and sung along to “Go, Cubs, Go” at a packed Wrigley Field. I didn’t even have a rooting interest in Nicaragua vs. Venezuela, and I’d take the WBC fans over the MLB fans every time.
Most in the building were rooting for Venezuela, and left happily. Though Nicaragua’s Cooperstown-bound manager Dusty Baker gave his best, his squad could not top the nine major-leaguers in the Venezuelan lineup.
The tone was set early when Ronald Acuña Jr.’s third-inning home run incited a thunderous roar from the Venezuelans.
The party never stopped. The Nicaraguans still smiled. Though each team’s fans were furious nationalists that night, there was only passion and love in the air.
Venezuela won in a 4-0 shutout, eventually besting the U.S. in the championship to take home the first WBC championship in the nation’s history.
There was deafening noise after the final out, and the Venezuelans’ ecstatic chants didn’t stop on the way to the doors. Though my rusty grasp of Spanish didn’t help me understand what was being shouted, I didn’t need to. I understood: This is what baseball really means.
I’ll be a fan of the game for the rest of my life, but from now on, even the greatest of Red Sox victories might feel a little hollow. For the baseball fan in me, I don’t think anything would mean more than another trip to Florida.