Cactus and Citrus: The Ultimate Winter Baseball Cocktail

Spring training is in full swing. In addition to baseball, the buzz is about upcoming labor negotiations and teams' swanky new facilities

By Rick Horrow and Karla Swatek

Even though a good portion of the U.S. is still awash in freezing rain and snow, baseball season is upon us. Pitchers, catchers, and all other position players have reported for spring training, and games in Arizona and Florida begin this weekend.

With Major League Baseball's official Opening Day little more than a month away, teams already are making sports business headlines. Florida Marlins President David Samson indicated that the team could sell naming rights for its new stadium by opening day this season. In Minnesota, the Twins have already sold 2.4 million tickets for their second season at Target Field, and the team expects to draw 3 million-plus fans to the stadium by season's end. The World Series Champion San Francisco Giants are seeing a giant rush for tickets at AT&T Park, with total ticket sales more than 25 percent ahead of last year. And in New York, all eyes are on Mets owners Fred and Jeff Wilpon, battling to retain their majority ownership of the ball club as they fight a $1 billion lawsuit from Irving Pickard, trustee of Bernard Madoff's holdings.

For the moment, however, it's time to step up to the spring plate, with a couple of new facilities squarely in the strike zone.

Biz of Baseball before the 2011 Season

Echoing the National Football League and the National Basketball Assn., the talk of this spring training season in both Florida and Arizona is MLB's next collective bargaining agreement. Even though the MLB's CBA expiration date is the furthest one out—the NFL's expires next week, and the NBA's at the end of June—MLB executives, owners, players, and relatively new MLBPA Executive Director Michael Weiner (facing his first CBA negotiation with the league after former union head Donald Fehr deftly handled the task for many years) are using the renewed focus on baseball to stake their claims.

Weiner, who this week began a tour of all 30 spring training camps, admitted that the NBA and NFL labor negotiations "conceivably could have an effect on our atmosphere" and shared that he anticipates meeting with MLB officials about the CBA "at least twice" during baseball's preseason. Besides the ever-present sports league dynamic of owners and players claiming that the other side gets too big a piece of the revenue pie, among the issues Weiner anticipates will dominate MLB CBA talks are entry-level player requirements, expanding the draft internationally, the use of smokeless tobacco, and the potential for shortening the MLB regular season. "We're all, in a sense, a victim of our success," Weiner opined to The New York Times on this topic. "Regular-season games are so valuable, you can't shorten the season without a significant dip in revenue."

Another topic Weiner broached during his tour stop at the St. Louis Cardinals camp in Jupiter, Fla., is the notion of player equity in the team for which he plays. "Have we thought about it a little bit? Yes. Have we thought about it a lot? No," he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "There are other circumstances in organized labor where you have a union [that] ends up with a piece of the business or members of the union end up with a piece of the business."