Bob's recent article about the Orioles' spring training site situation got me thinking...again.  This is not necessarily a good thing.  He focused his attention on the Ft. Lauderdale end of the problem.  I'm going to shine a small spotlight on the Sarasota side of things, and then try to put the entire matter into some sort of context.

I've been beating this spring training site issue to death for years and years...and, remarkably, absolutely nothing has changed in a material sense over that span of time.  Nothing.  When I first started complaining, the Orioles had a "split camp" situation on their hands, with the major league spring training facility at the obsolete former Yankees' home in Ft. Lauderdale and the minor league camp held at Twin Lakes Park in Sarasota County, Florida.

As I understand it, the Orioles recently renewed their lease with Sarasota County to continue using Twin Lakes for two more years (i.e. 2006 and 2007). This is also, not incidentally, where the club's extended spring training operation is held.

As luck would have it, Twin Lakes is where the Orioles Fantasy Camp is conducted, so I've spent a week there each of the past eight years.

The club can probably get away with holding its minor league camp there because a lot of the guys who spend spring training at minor league camps don't, initially, really know what to expect from a facilities standpoint. Of course, once they start playing games at other complexes, that goes by the boards. The locker room at Twin Lakes is not air conditioned. (The trainer's room is, and so is the camp coordinator's office and the cafeteria, but the locker room itself is not climate controlled.) Remember, this is Florida, and extended spring training runs well into June.  Until a couple of years ago, when the Orioles folded their Gulf Coast League team, Twin Lakes was the site of the Rookie League club that began play in late June (and wrapped up around Labor Day). Imagine what it must be like to deal with that locker room in the heat and humidity of a Florida summer. Understand, the locker room is not merely where you dress/undress and shower (though that would be bad enough...and believe me, that place is dank as hell in late January/early February most of the time); this is also where the aerobic exercise equipment and weight machines (and free weights) are stored and used.  Think about how much fun it would be to work out at your local health club in the dead of summer if it wasn't air conditioned.  Now cube that.  That's Twin Lakes.

The Orioles are--and have been for some time--the only organization in baseball with separate spring training facilities for their major and minor league players.  The problem isn't simply that both of these facilities are substandard.  Even if both complexes were state of the art, the Orioles would be at a competitive disadvantage, given the difficulty instructors would have working with players in the two camps.  The poor state of the physical plant in both locations merely compounds this shortcoming.

This would be a less than desirable situation if the two separate camps were a short drive down the road from one another, but that's far from the case.  Ft. Lauderdale and Sarasota are on opposite coasts, with the former much farther south than the latter.  The two complexes are more than 200 driving miles apart.  And, yes, players and staff do have cause to shuttle back and forth between the two on occasion.  If staff members in, say, the White Sox organization want to work with players in both the major and minor league camps on the same day, they have to switch fields at the club's Tucson complex...or have members of both groups come to the same field.  If the Orioles wanted to do that...well, let's just say that it doesn't happen.

The problems surrounding this situation are palpable, and they've been repeated so many times they sound hackneyed at this point.  And yet they persist, with no end in sight.

Despite protestations to the contrary--several made by senior members of the Orioles front office to my face over the past few years, I can only conclude that the spring training site matter is not a priority for this organization.  That doesn't mean that I'm calling out the people who have told me otherwise as liars.  Rather, what has gone unsaid publicly, but is eminently clear to anyone who is reading between the lines, is that individuals at the very highest (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) end of the Orioles food chain have considerations that impact the spring training site issue directly, and not in ways that necessarily work to the short-term--or long-term--advantage of the organization as a whole.

And that, dear readers, is not a positive thing for fans of the Baltimore Orioles.

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