Spring Training Online

In his annual spring meeting with reporters, Cubs Chairman Crane Kenney admits the team's days at Mesa's HoHoKam Park are numbered and says the team is looking at a new spring-training home.

The issue: the team practices at Fitch Field and plays at HoHoKam Park. While HoHoKam Park is a perfectly fine facility and the Cubs are a great draw -- perennially leading the Cactus League in attendance -- the ballpark lacks the luxury amenities you find in the new spring facilities. When you have luxury, you have bigger bucks (in theory; the Dodgers and the White Sox found out differently this spring at Camelback Ranch Stadium). And with Tom Ricketts closing on the $900-million purchase of the Cubs and Wrigley Field, the more bucks the better.

The only team that entered February games selling out every fixed seat for every spring-training matchup?

Not the Red Sox.

Not the Yankees.

It was the Tampa Bay Rays, who sold out every fixed seat at Charlotte County Sports Park well in advance of the team's first game of 2009.

Spring-training attendance is down some 20 percent this spring when compared to 2008, as teams struggle with smaller crowds.

We all knew this would be a rough spring in Vero Beach, the first for the community after the departure of the Dodgers from Dodgertown. Now Indian River County is scrambling to bring back baseball, but the chances are amateurs, not pros, will on the field.

We are already planning the next version of Spring Training Online for 2010. And as we do so, we'd like to hear from you.

By all measures, the revamping of the site was a tremendous success: we doubled site traffic and the number of unique visitors to the site. The site and our book, The Complete Guide to Spring Training, were featured in literally hundreds of newspapers this spring (thanks, AP!), and high sales forced us into a second printing of The Complete Guide to Spring Training. So let's just say we're really, really happy with all the support you've shown us.

We want to hear more from you. We've set up an online survey (click here to take it) with some questions about you, how you approach spring training and what you do when you go. We also set up areas for you to tell us what else you'd like to see from Spring Training Online in the future. The entire survey is 45 questions; it should take you less than five minutes to complete.

And as a thanks for your time, we'll enter all respondents to the survey in a drawing for August Publications books. One out of every 10 respondents will receive their choice of a book, including The Complete Guide to Spring Training, The Complete Guide to Big League Ballparks, Homer, or Cradle of the Game: Baseball and Ballparks in North Carolina. We appreciate the attention each and every one of you has thrown our way this spring.