Seeing Baseball Through a Tiny Lens

I haven’t been to a spring training game since 2011. I don’t remember the game as well as I remember the events that led up to it. I’d spent two years temping at a bank depository near JFK airport, tracking the transactions of gold, silver, platinum, and palladium bars. Losing track of a gold bar worth half a million dollars wasn’t really an option, so it was a pretty high-pressure job for a 25-year-old making $19 an hour. Because we had to know the market price of gold at all times, I can tell you that for each month I worked, I earned the equivalent of a single gold coin. I gave my notice in January, and in February I took my meager savings and booked a trip across the country by Greyhound bus. After I wore out my welcome with my sister in California, I visited my friend Alex in Arizona and we caught a Reds game at Goodyear Park. Yesterday, I dug up an email exchange from when I was planning my escape. Alex asked how long I expeced to be gone; were we talking days or weeks? “We are talking weeks,” I wrote back. “We are talking about quitting my job and getting the f*** out of here.”

This long walk of a lede is intended to introduce two themes. The first is that most fans don’t get to see much of spring training. We’ve only got so many vacation days, and most of us don’t live near Florida or Arizona. All the games are day games, and even when they’re televised, we can’t exactly watch them in the middle of a work day. I’d venture to say that I’m a pretty big baseball person, and it took a minor existential crisis to get me to my one and only Cactus League game. As a result, spring training is both the time when we’re thirstiest for baseball news and the time when we’re most dependent on beat writers for it.

As always, beat writers are watching the games we can’t and talking to the players and coaches. They’re also getting a much more expansive view than they have during the regular season. They’re observing on the backfields during bullpen sessions, infield drills, live batting practice, and the occasional cabbage race. You might hear through a team spokesman that Rafael Devers has started taking grounders, but a beat writer like Jen McCaffrey, who covers the Red Sox for The Athletic, can put you right there, watching Devers scoop balls off a strip of turf tucked behind a metal fence, with Kristian Campbell looking on and Vaughn Grissom shooting baskets while he waits his turn.

“I knew that Devers would be doing some of his separate,” McCaffrey told me, explaining how she prepared to get that shot. She left the team’s clubhouse availability early to make sure that there was a spot from which she could film him. Given the awkward location, she couldn’t do much about the quality of the video, but she knew that any news about Devers would be welcome. “I figured people are probably interested. What’s he doing? How’s he preparing? People have a lot of questions about him.”

That brings us to our second theme, which is mission creep. I’ve been thinking about it a lot during spring training, specifically because of videos like that one. I first heard the phrase in a book about the space shuttle program – astronauts trying to keep their schedules from getting so overloaded with experiments that they wouldn’t be able to keep up – but mission creep can come in many forms. I think about it most often in a work context. You start a job with a certain set of responsibilities, but somehow, you just keep accumulating new ones until you’re completely buried. When I started at the bank depository in 2009, my job was to help out with the paperwork on trades. I was just an extra pair of hands, and not a particularly busy pair. “You should probably bring a book,” my boss told me on my first day.

Sitting at my desk – a plastic folding table that generated enough static electricity to solve the global energy crisis – I read the complete works of Shakespeare cover to cover. I read the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” and Infinite Jest, but I also started to get busier. By the time I gave my notice, I had been told to knock it off with the reading. I was using four redundant systems to track the thousands of bars and coins that entered and exited the warehouse. I tracked them on paper, and on a creaky — literally — IBM ThinkPad from the 1990s, I tracked them in a gargantuan Excel spreadsheet, a 1970s computer program straight out of Apollo 13 mission control, and a new, web-based program that didn’t quite work yet.

For beat writers, technology and social media are huge sources of mission creep. Over the past several years, it’s become standard for writers to respond to fan questions on social media, as well as to post pictures and video from batting practice, live play-by-play of the game, and the most interesting quotes from their pre- and post-game interviews. It’s a huge amount of work, and it steals time away from the core job of writing about the team. This article is specifically about pictures and videos from spring training, which have proliferated in recent years. When Blue Jays pitchers and catchers reported to Dunedin, MLB.com’s Keegan Matheson posted long videos of bullpen sessions from directly behind the catcher. Curious how Max Scherzer would look coming off an injury-riddled 2024 season? You could judge the break on his changeup and see the life on his fastball for yourself, because Matheson was willing to stand there keeping his phone’s camera lens perfectly aligned with a hole in the chain link fence as 93-mph heaters bore down on him.

After growing in popularity of for years, this kind of video has reached critical mass. For the last two weeks, my Bluesky feed has consisted of two things and two things only: soothing videos of ballplayers beneath blue skies, tuning up for the season on quiet backfields, and frantic missives documenting the collapse of American democracy. I reached out to several writers to talk about these videos, both because I can’t get enough of them and because this is more fun to talk about than the second thing.

The first thing I learned is that this particular form of mission creep is not mandatory. Everyone told me that while finding new ways to engage with potential readers isn’t exactly frowned upon, it’s not something they’re asked to do, and several mentioned that Twitter doesn’t generate much traffic for their publications anymore. Still, the practice has become standard. Spencer Nusbaum, who covers the Nationals for the Washington Post, told me in an email that he started taking videos as a way to reinforce his handwritten notes, but “started posting (some of them) because other people were doing it.” Said McCaffrey, “When I started covering the team 10, 11 years ago, I think it was out there, but I feel like over the past decade or so, it’s definitely become a thing that beat writers have leaned into.” Andy Kostka, who covers the Orioles for The Baltimore Banner, called it “a practice I do without stopping to wonder why.”

The obvious appeal is that after a long offseason, people really want to know what’s going on with their team. “It’s mostly a spring training thing for me,” said Peter Abraham, the Boston Globe’s baseball columnist, in an email. “People seem to like seeing the players for the first time in a while, the new guys especially.” Beat writers tend to hear plenty of criticism about their coverage of the team, so the opportunity to deliver something that people are truly excited to see is gratifying. “Especially at this time of the year,” Kostka said in a DM, “the dopamine hit of sending a video and seeing fans super amped for a rudimentary task is pretty great. Video of someone lightly tossing a baseball? Some guy replies: ‘This gave me life.’ … It helps me a little remember that I’m pretty lucky to do this.” Dan Hayes, who writes about the Twins for The Athletic and has been covering spring training since 2007, reminded me in a DM that, like most baseball writers, he started out as a huge fan: “I’m afforded access that most fans will never experience. Not only does the company send me to Florida at a time where 99 percent of my followers are freezing, but I’m allowed into certain areas of the park that [are] restricted to fans. Giving them a sense of what goes on here is fun.”

As Hayes mentioned, the videos also show us a part of the game that we just don’t get to see. The jobs of players and coaches look very different during the first few weeks of spring training, and we only glimpse them through this particular form of media. “The access is great,” said Nusbaum, who noted that he’s sometimes so close to the action that he has to be careful about blocking the view of the coaching staff. “The press box at Nationals Park is a million feet in the air when the games are going on. Also, we’re typing away as the action is happening during the season. We can be a few feet away from the action here, unencumbered by laptops. We can see, for instance, what the pitching coach is trying to teach 15 feet away. It’s fun to document that visually.”

The access doesn’t always mean that the videos are easy to get, however. Sometimes phones break or run out of memory. Sometimes it’s just awkward. “Trying to record through holes in the fence from a pretty bad angle,” Nusbaum said. “Yeah, that’s absolutely the worst part.” The extra work that goes into this also presents an extra opportunity for critics. “I’ve had fans yell at me more so for quality,” said McCaffrey. “One guy was like, ‘You need to do horizontal instead of vertical video,’ she said, laughing. “I was like, ‘OK, alright. Calm down, buddy.’”

During the regular season, a player can make 600 plate appearances, but as the pictures and video demonstrate, spring training is its own kind of pressure cooker. During live BP, it’s not at all uncommon to see the entire coaching staff, prominent members of the front office, and a cadre of players posted up directly behind the catcher, watching intently through the legs of the extra-large tripod that holds the portable Trackman unit.

Said McCaffrey, “I don’t know how other teams do it, because obviously I’m following the Red Sox throughout the spring, but every time a guy pitches, pretty much the entire pitching staff comes out and watches him. It’s kind of interesting and a camaraderie thing.” At Jet Blue Park in Fort Myers, she stayed zoomed out for several videos of live BP. The skewed angle allowed her to capture the action on the field, some of the prominent spectators, and the live Trackman feed on the right field scoreboard. Not only could you watch Garrett Crochet dispose of Roman Anthony, but six days after pitchers and catchers reported, you could see that he was already in midseason form, his four-seamer hitting 97 mph with 15 inches of induced vertical break. “That’s also something I like to try to get in there too,” she said, “so fans that are into the analytics side of the game can see some of the numbers of what guys are working on in practice, and how pitches are landing or moving.”

At the same time, there’s so much going on throughout the complex that writers also have the chance to catch something no one else sees. “You never know when something is going to add some color to your story,” Nusbaum said. “In spring training, because of the access, because you can head over to a backfield that no one else is at or talk to the prospect that you might only see once during the actual season, you can get some truly unique scenes.” He often keeps those moments off social media, stashing them in his back pocket for use during the grind of a long season. “That might seem counterintuitive, vis a vis engaging with fans. But at the end of the day, my primary job is to write, and sometimes I want to save a video until the story is out. Because there’s probably context there that fits with a story rather than a tweet.”

What I personally love the most about these videos is the fact that they look like what they are: cell phone videos taken by regular people. “I don’t have the best technology,” said McCaffrey. “It’s just my iPhone, so it’s not like I can do too much about that.” I think we tend to forget about how beautifully baseball is packaged most of the time. The picture at the top of every article was selected by an editor from a dozen competing options, all of them taken by a ridiculously talented professional sports photographer with a shelf full of awards at home. The same goes for the camera operators who shoot the games for television, and they’re just part of a production team brandishing the latest technology to make the game look gorgeous. John DeMarsico, who directs Mets broadcasts for SNY, is fond of saying that baseball is cinema, and that’s never been more true. But for these few weeks during spring training, we get to see it through a less cinematic, more personal lens. We see it in 12-second clips with the wind whipping in the background, shot on whichever phone a reporter has in their pocket, from whatever odd angle they can finagle.

For a couple weeks, we get to see the game through a completely different lens, both literally and figuratively (or as the kids say, flitteratively). I don’t mean to say that the gorgeous version of baseball that we see for most of the year isn’t real, but it is undeniably stylized. Even on a quiet getaway day, it’s presented with grandeur. It feeds into the mythos of the game, the idea of baseball, the one you can’t not be romantic about. I just enjoy seeing the scruffy edges. Sure, baseball is an idea, but they make it feel more real to me, more personal.

Even when I explained it to them, people had trouble wrapping their heads around my job at the bank depository. When you think about investing in gold, you probably just imagine clicking a button on the computer or asking a financial advisor to click a button on the computer. An extra graph appears on your Charles Schwab splash page; now you’ve invested in gold. To you, it’s just the idea of gold. But it’s also real, and not particularly glamorous. You have to buy it on the commodities exchange and pay a storage fee. I sat in a gross, windowless office next to a gross, windowless warehouse stacked high with pallets of tarnished 1,000 ounce silver bars. For a couple years, when your financial advisor clicked that button, I would end up getting a fax, writing a transfer order, logging it in four separate places, and handing a carbon copy to Sylvia, who handed it to Garry, who handed it to Mike, who carried a specific gold bar from one part of the vault to another. “It’s sort of like if you traded for Derek Jeter on your fantasy team,” I’d say, “and then a clubhouse attendant had to load him up on a cart and wheel him over to the other side of the locker room.”

“There are two types of realist,” Robert Frost wrote. “The one who offers a good deal of dirt with his potato to show that it is a real potato. And there is the one who is satisfied with the potato brushed clean. I am inclined to be the second kind. To me, the thing that art does for life is to clean it, strip it to form.” I’m inclined to be the first kind. I can’t help it. I like hearing the strings squeak as the guitarist’s fingers scramble up the fretboard. It makes me feel like I’m there in the room. I love that there’s a little window of time when baseball’s acres and acres of dirt don’t get cleaned up. “I’m certainly not a good photographer,” Abraham said. “If I like a photo I’ll post it. That’s really about it. Once the games start and people can watch NESN, I’ll dial back unless it’s something unusual.”

On my last day at work, my colleagues Chubby and Sylvia gave me a going away present: a one-ounce bar of silver. I’ve still got it. At Goodyear Field, Alex and I were excited to see Aroldis Chapman throw a ball faster than anyone else on earth could throw a ball, and, if my memory’s right, I think we did. I remember walking across the grassy parking lot. I remember eating chili dogs in the shade of the concession stand, so focused on not spilling anything on our clothes that we didn’t notice the foul ball coming until it landed right at our feet and caromed off the wall right in front of our faces.

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