Major League Baseball

Arizona-Florida baseball rivalry goes well beyond spring training

Published Mar. 2, 2022 8:43 a.m. ET

By Pedro Moura
FOX Sports MLB Writer

At the beginning of February, more than 100 members of the MLB Players Association gathered at an informal meeting to discuss the ongoing lockout.

"It was exciting," Yankees ace Gerrit Cole wrote on Twitter, "to see solidarity this high."

The crowd convened in Arizona because the state is increasingly one of the out-of-season epicenters of this sport. The other is Florida, where another MLBPA meeting was held.

Unlike in, say, the NBA, where glitzy Los Angeles is the common offseason home for players, American ballplayers tend to spend their offseasons in Arizona or Florida. And for the foreigners who stay in the U.S. over the winter, the two states are very common homes, too.

Nos. 4 and 5 in our United States of Baseball rankings, Florida and Arizona make for a natural juxtaposition. Florida has the longer spring training history and the additional major-league team, but Arizona, another locale with warm weather and friendly state taxes, seems to offer an oasis for more and more major-leaguers’ permanent residences.

Arizona also boasts dominant collegiate baseball at a level unmatched by Florida and most other states. At the Division I level, Arizona and Arizona State are annual behemoths that send many players to the professional ranks. Despite possessing only three top-tier schools, Arizona is second, behind only California, in College World Series titles.

For context: Nebraska has just as many Division I baseball programs as Arizona. Nebraska's schools have competed in the CWS four times. Arizona’s three schools have competed 40 times. That supremacy extends all the way down to junior college, where Yavapai College, Central Arizona College and Arizona Western College do something similar.

In terms of college-program quantity, though, Florida crushes Arizona.

So do plenty of other states. There’s a reason: Arizona lacks the population centers of many mid-tier states in our rankings. According to the 2020 census, the Phoenix metropolitan area accounts for more than two-thirds of Arizona residents.

The upside of that is the remarkably centralized Cactus League, especially after the last Tucson teams moved to the Phoenix area a decade ago and especially in contrast to Florida’s spread-out Grapefruit League.

Some major-leaguers particularly attached to Arizona’s shorter drives have even been known to use an Arizona spring training home as a tiebreaker when picking between two free-agent offers. Decisions have been made for worse reasons! The longest drive in the Cactus League is 45 miles. The longest drive in the Grapefruit League is nearly five times that. Because of that, Arizona also offers a far easier visit for the typical spring training fan.

Arizona and its colleges have also long welcomed transplant Californians, including Hall of Fame right-hander Jim Palmer (Arizona State alum), first-ever MLB Draft pick Rick Monday (ASU), Hall of Fame closer Trevor Hoffman (Arizona) and, more recently, standout second baseman Dustin Pedroia (ASU). Arizona doesn’t have any native-born Hall of Famers, but Palmer and Hoffman should count for something.

Overall, Florida wins in terms of baseball depth, but Arizona wins in terms of concentration. The Phoenix area is, more than any other place, the modern epicenter of American baseball. There is no full-season minor-league baseball in the state, but it is where the industry convenes every autumn for the Arizona Fall League, an annual rite for many of the sport’s top prospects. When Washington-headquartered training facility Driveline Baseball sought to open a second location, the company zeroed in on Phoenix. Because, of course.

But Florida has its own world-class training facilities, including that of the Yankees’ director of player health, Eric Cressey. Florida is in danger of losing one of its two MLB teams, the Tampa Bay Rays, who want to spend half their time in Canada, but the state's ranking is really not predicated on those teams. It's ranked fourth because it has always produced players.

As with Texas, which is gaining on New York because of state-wide population growth, Arizona is gaining on its peers. Of the 132 major-leaguers born in Arizona, 108 have reached the majors this century. Twenty-four — nearly 20% — were playing in the major leagues in 2021, including, perhaps most notably, the Dodgers’ Cody Bellinger.

Of course, Bellinger was born in Arizona because his father, Clay, a former big-leaguer, made his offseason home in the Phoenix suburbs. That’s Arizona for you.

Still, Florida tops Arizona for now because of the sheer volume of current major-leaguers who were born in the Sunshine State. From Manny Machado to Trea Turner, Kyle Tucker to Josh Donaldson, Anthony Rizzo to Andrew McCutchen, many of baseball’s biggest stars began playing the game in Florida.

Pedro Moura is the national baseball writer for FOX Sports. He most recently covered the Dodgers for three seasons for The Athletic. Previously, he spent five years covering the Angels and Dodgers for the Orange County Register and L.A. Times. More previously, he covered his alma mater, USC, for ESPNLosAngeles.com. The son of Brazilian immigrants, he grew up in the Southern California suburbs. Follow him on Twitter @pedromoura.