Cactus League vs Grapefruit League: Teams and Ballparks

From the park the Royals and Rangers share in Surprise, Arizona, to the Cubs' park in Mesa is about 45 miles, and that is close to the longest trip any club makes in the Cactus League. The Blue Jays' bus from Dunedin, on Florida's Gulf Coast, to play the Astros or the Nationals in West Palm Beach covers more than 200. Both are spring training road trips in Major League Baseball. They are not the same kind of afternoon.

The Cactus League is the 15 MLB clubs that hold spring training in Arizona, and the Grapefruit League is the 15 that hold it in Florida. That is the whole definition. Neither has anything to do with the American and National Leagues: each contains clubs from both, and membership depends only on where a team's complex sits. All 15 Arizona clubs are inside Greater Phoenix, sharing ten ballparks. The 15 Florida clubs use 13 ballparks on two coasts and one inland city.

The split in one line: 15 clubs in each state, and no link to the AL or NL

The confusion is understandable. Baseball already has two leagues, and here are two more names with "League" on the end. But the AL and NL are competitive structures with pennants and a rulebook history, compared in our guide to the American League and the National League. The Cactus and Grapefruit Leagues are postal addresses.

Sort the six divisions by where their clubs train and the geography shows through.

Division	Train in Arizona	Train in Florida
AL East	None	Orioles, Red Sox, Yankees, Rays, Blue Jays
AL Central	White Sox, Guardians, Royals	Tigers, Twins
AL West	Angels, Athletics, Mariners, Rangers	Astros
NL East	None	Braves, Marlins, Mets, Phillies, Nationals
NL Central	Cubs, Reds, Brewers	Pirates, Cardinals
NL West	Diamondbacks, Rockies, Dodgers, Padres, Giants	None

Western clubs go to Arizona and eastern clubs to Florida, which is what anyone would guess. The middle of the country is where it gets arbitrary. Cleveland and Cincinnati, Ohio clubs a four-hour drive apart, share a complex in Goodyear, Arizona, having left Florida within a year of each other. Detroit, one state north of them, has trained in the same Florida town since the Roosevelt administration. Houston is the one western-division club in Florida, a leftover from its half-century in the National League.

Count them up and Arizona has seven American League clubs and eight from the National League. Florida has the reverse.

• Arizona
• Florida

Clubs1515

Ballparks1013

Parks shared by two clubs52

Clubs, game ballparks and two-club complexes in each state as of spring 2026. Arizona's count of ten parks dates from 2011 and Florida's 13 from 2017. Practice-only facilities are not counted.

Show the numbers

The two spring circuits by the numbers

Item	Arizona	Florida
Clubs	15	15
Ballparks	10	13
Parks shared by two clubs	5	2

That last row is the structural difference between the two. Arizona built for sharing. Florida, with a few exceptions, did not.

Cactus League teams: every club inside Greater Phoenix

Ten ballparks, one metropolitan area. The Cactus League's map fits inside Maricopa County, and the longest drive between two of its parks takes about an hour without traffic.

Ballpark	Location	Club or clubs	There since
Salt River Fields at Talking Stick	Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, beside Scottsdale	Diamondbacks and Rockies	2011
Camelback Ranch	Glendale	Dodgers and White Sox	2009
Goodyear Ballpark	Goodyear	Guardians and Reds	2009 and 2010
Peoria Sports Complex	Peoria	Padres and Mariners	1994
Surprise Stadium	Surprise	Royals and Rangers	2003
Sloan Park	Mesa	Cubs	2014
Hohokam Stadium	Mesa	Athletics	2015
Tempe Diablo Stadium	Tempe	Angels	1993
Scottsdale Stadium	Scottsdale	Giants	1984
American Family Fields of Phoenix	West Phoenix	Brewers	1998

The last column is the year the club first played at that ballpark, or on that site in the case of Scottsdale, where the Giants' stadium was rebuilt in 1992. Sponsor names on these parks change, and a couple have changed more than once. The cities do not.

The five shared complexes follow a single pattern, set by Peoria in 1994. One stadium sits in the middle. Each club has its own clubhouse, its own half-dozen practice fields and its own offices on opposite sides of it, so that two organizations can live on one property for six weeks and barely meet. On game days one of them is always the home team, which means the stadium is in use nearly every afternoon of the exhibition schedule. A city that builds for one club gets about 15 dates. A city that builds for two gets about 30 for the price of one grandstand.

Salt River Fields deserves a line of its own. It opened in 2011 on land belonging to the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community and was financed by the community, the first major league spring facility built on tribal land.

The five single-club parks belong to clubs that have been in Arizona for decades and had no reason to move in with a neighbor. The Cubs are the anchor tenant of the whole circuit. They first trained in Mesa in 1952, spent 1966 in Long Beach, California, and 1967 through 1978 in Scottsdale, and have been back in Mesa every spring since 1979. They draw the largest spring crowds in baseball by a distance, and play in the largest spring ballpark, which the city built for them in 2014 after the club let it be known that Florida was interested.

What happened to Tucson

For 64 years the Cactus League had a second city. Cleveland trained in Tucson from 1947 to 1992, and the Rockies, Diamondbacks and White Sox were all there at the end of the 1990s. The trouble was the 100-plus miles of interstate between Tucson and Phoenix. As more clubs gathered in the Phoenix suburbs, the Tucson teams were the only ones facing a two-hour bus ride for most road games, and one by one they left. The White Sox went to Glendale in 2009. The Diamondbacks and Rockies moved to Salt River Fields in 2011, and Tucson has had no club since.

Grapefruit League teams: two coasts and Lakeland

Florida's map is a different animal. Thirteen ballparks in a dozen cities, strung along both sides of a peninsula, with Lake Okeechobee and a great deal of empty country in between.

City	Ballpark	Club or clubs	There since
Dunedin	TD Ballpark	Blue Jays	1977
Clearwater	BayCare Ballpark	Phillies	1947
Tampa	George M. Steinbrenner Field	Yankees	1996
Lakeland	Joker Marchant Stadium	Tigers	1934
Bradenton	LECOM Park	Pirates	1969
Sarasota	Ed Smith Stadium	Orioles	2010
North Port	CoolToday Park	Braves	2019
Port Charlotte	Charlotte Sports Park	Rays	2009
Fort Myers	Hammond Stadium	Twins	1991
Fort Myers	JetBlue Park	Red Sox	1993
Port St. Lucie	Clover Park	Mets	1988
Jupiter	Roger Dean Stadium	Cardinals and Marlins	1998 and 2003
West Palm Beach	CACTI Park of the Palm Beaches	Astros and Nationals	2017

The "there since" column gives the year the club began training in that city, which in several cases is older than the park. The Phillies, Tigers and Red Sox have each changed stadiums without changing towns. As in Arizona, the corporate names attached to these parks are the least permanent thing about them.

Geographically the 15 clubs fall into five groups.

• Tampa Bay area20.0%
• Lakeland, inland6.7%
• Bradenton to Port Charlotte26.7%
• Fort Myers13.3%
• Atlantic coast33.3%

Clubs grouped by region of Florida. The grouping is ours, drawn from the cities in the table above, and is not an official division of the league.

Show the numbers

Where the 15 Grapefruit League clubs are based

Item	Value
Tampa Bay area	3clubs
Lakeland, inland	1clubs
Bradenton to Port Charlotte	4clubs
Fort Myers	2clubs
Atlantic coast	5clubs

The Gulf Coast. Nine clubs, running about 140 miles from Dunedin in the north to Fort Myers in the south. The Blue Jays, Phillies and Yankees sit within a few miles of each other around Tampa Bay. Below the Sunshine Skyway bridge come the Pirates in Bradenton, the Orioles in Sarasota, the Braves in North Port and the Rays in Port Charlotte, each 20 to 40 minutes from the next. Fort Myers, at the bottom, has the Twins and Red Sox in separate parks a short drive apart.

Lakeland. The Tigers are on their own, about 35 miles east of Tampa in the middle of the state. That position, an hour from the Gulf group and within reach of nothing else, was once ordinary. Central Florida used to be full of camps: Winter Haven, Kissimmee, Plant City, Orlando, the Disney complex at Lake Buena Vista. Every one has gone, and Lakeland is the last inland spring town.

The Atlantic side. Five clubs in three parks. The Cardinals and Marlins share Jupiter, the Astros and Nationals share West Palm Beach a quarter of an hour to the south, and the Mets are in Port St. Lucie, about 40 miles up the coast. These are Florida's only two-club complexes, and both were built on the Arizona model. The West Palm Beach park, opened in 2017, exists because the Astros and Nationals were each isolated, Houston in Kissimmee and Washington in Viera on the Space Coast, and each wanted company.

Travel: an hour in Arizona, half a day in Florida

Nothing separates the two circuits more than the bus.

In Arizona a visiting club can leave its own complex after a morning workout, drive 25 or 40 minutes, play, and be home for dinner. Players often drive themselves. Because no trip is a hardship, managers have little reason to leave anyone behind, and a road lineup in the Cactus League looks a good deal like a home one.

Closeness shapes the schedule as well. With every opponent inside an hour, an Arizona club can face all 14 of the others in a single spring, most of them more than once, and the visitors at any one park change almost daily.

Florida's distances change behavior. A Gulf Coast club drawn against one of the Atlantic clubs faces two and a half to three hours each way across the state, much of it on state highways through cattle and cane country. Established players do not make that trip. The league has long asked visiting clubs to bring a minimum number of established players, and the request is honored in the letter. The lineup that gets off the bus in Jupiter after three hours on the road is a few players a casual fan has heard of and a supporting cast wearing numbers in the 80s.

So the Florida schedule is built to avoid those trips. Clubs play their neighbors again and again. The Red Sox and Twins, two clubs in the same city, meet often enough each spring that Fort Myers treats it as a local series with a trophy of its own. The Cardinals and Marlins, who share a stadium, simply swap dugouts. A Gulf Coast club might cross the state once or twice all spring, and in a given spring some pairs of Grapefruit League clubs never meet at all.

What it does to the players

Pitchers feel it most. A starter scheduled for four innings on the far coast either endures six hours on a bus around his outing or stays behind and throws his four innings in a back-field game against minor leaguers. Florida clubs choose the second option often. Arizona clubs rarely need to.

Weather and how the ball plays in each state

Phoenix in March is dry, cloudless and warm, with afternoons in the 70s and 80s and almost no rain. A Cactus League rainout is rare enough to be a news item. Florida in March is warm and humid, with wind off the water and a real chance of an afternoon storm, and the Grapefruit League loses several games a year to weather. A canceled exhibition is not made up; nothing depends on it. The rules that apply once games count are in our guide to rain delays, rainouts and official games.

The ball carries farther in Arizona. Greater Phoenix sits about 1,100 feet above sea level and every Florida park is within a few feet of it, and thinner air means less drag on a fly ball and less bite on a breaking pitch. When clubs trained in Tucson, at more than twice Phoenix's elevation, the effect was stronger still.

Here is the awkward part, because the usual explanation is backward. People say the ball dies in Florida because humid air is heavy. Humid air is in fact slightly less dense than dry air at the same temperature and pressure. What humidity changes is the baseball: a ball stored in damp conditions absorbs moisture, gets a little heavier and comes off the bat with less spring, and a ball stored in desert air dries out and does the opposite. It is the reason the Diamondbacks, like the Rockies before them, installed a humidor at their regular-season park. The physics behind all this is in our explainer on why no two ballparks play alike.

The fields differ too. Arizona infields bake hard under the sun and ground balls get through them quickly, which flatters hitters a second time. Outfielders complain about the "high sky," a featureless blue with no clouds to judge a fly ball against. Florida's grass is softer and slower, and the difficulty there is wind.

Put together, a pitcher's March numbers in Arizona tend to look worse than the same pitcher's would in Florida, for reasons unrelated to how he is throwing. Clubs know this and adjust. Whether fans reading a box score do is another matter.

Why is it called the Grapefruit League?

Daytona Beach, March 13, 1915. Wilbert Robinson, the round and popular manager of the Brooklyn club, had been a catcher on the great Baltimore teams of the 1890s, and the Brooklyn club of those years was called the Robins after him. He was aware that Washington catcher Gabby Street had earned a place in baseball lore in 1908 by catching a ball dropped from the top of the Washington Monument. An airplane offered a chance to beat it. The aviator Ruth Law, who would set an American long-distance flying record the following year, was giving exhibition flights from the beach that spring, and it was arranged that she would drop a baseball from several hundred feet for Robinson to catch.

What came down was a grapefruit. It struck Robinson's mitt, burst, and covered him in pulp and juice, and by every account he was briefly sure the liquid was his own blood. The players who had gathered to watch worked out what it was before he did.

Who made the switch is disputed, and the dispute is part of the story. Casey Stengel, then a Brooklyn outfielder and a known practical joker, was blamed for decades and did little to discourage it. Law herself said later that there was no plot: she had forgotten to bring the baseball and took a grapefruit from a member of her ground crew, who had it for lunch. Hers is the first-hand account. Stengel's is the better anecdote. Robinson went on to manage Brooklyn through 1931 and was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1945.

Whether the stunt named the league is less certain than the retelling suggests. Sportswriters were calling Florida's exhibition circuit the Grapefruit League by the 1920s, and citrus was the state's signature crop, which is explanation enough on its own. The honest version is that the name has an obvious source and a famous story attached to it, and nobody at the time wrote down which came first.

"Cactus League" followed by analogy, once Arizona had enough clubs in the 1950s for the comparison to make sense.

How Arizona got its teams

Arizona's first spring club did not stay. The Detroit Tigers trained in Phoenix in 1929, found little competition within reach, and went elsewhere the next year.

The Cactus League proper begins in 1947, with two owners. Bill Veeck had bought the Cleveland Indians the previous summer and owned a ranch near Tucson. Horace Stoneham of the New York Giants had taken to wintering in the Phoenix area. Each needed the other, since a club training alone has nobody to play, and they agreed to move west together: Cleveland to Tucson, the Giants to Phoenix.

Larry Doby and the Florida hotels

Veeck gave a second reason, in his memoir and afterward. By his account, while running the minor-league Milwaukee Brewers at a Florida camp in the early 1940s he sat down in the section of the grandstand reserved for Black spectators and was told by local officials to move. He intended to integrate the Indians, and he did not want to do it in Florida.

In July 1947, eleven weeks after Jackie Robinson's debut for Brooklyn, Veeck signed Larry Doby from the Newark Eagles, and Doby became the American League's first Black player. That story and its National League counterpart are told in our pages on Jackie Robinson and the color barrier and on the Negro Leagues. Doby's first big-league spring was in Tucson in 1948.

Arizona was better than Florida. It was not good. The hotel that housed the Indians in Tucson would not give Doby a room, and he lived that spring with a local Black family. In Florida the same arrangement, Black players boarding in private homes across town from the team hotel, lasted into the early 1960s, until players led by the Cardinals' Bill White objected publicly in St. Petersburg and clubs began insisting on integrated housing.

The slow drift west

The number of Cactus League clubs in selected years. The count has been 15 every spring since 2010.

Show the numbers

Clubs training in Arizona, 1947 to 2010

Item	Clubs
1947	2clubs
1992	8clubs
1998	10clubs
2003	12clubs
2009	14clubs
2010	15clubs

The Cubs arrived in Mesa in 1952 and, one spring in California aside, have been in the Phoenix area ever since. Baltimore and Boston tried Arizona for a few years each in the 1950s and 1960s and went back east. The 1969 expansion brought the San Diego Padres and the Seattle Pilots, who became the Milwaukee Brewers a year later and stayed in the desert, and the Oakland Athletics moved in the same spring. Seattle's second club, the Mariners, came in 1977. The pattern is easy to see in our history of MLB expansion from 16 clubs to 30: each new western franchise made Arizona's circuit a little more viable.

At the start of the 1990s the Cactus League had eight clubs and was in danger of having fewer. Florida cities were bidding for teams, and Cleveland, one of the two founders, left Tucson for Winter Haven after the 1992 spring. Arizona's answer was money, described in the next section. It worked. The expansion Rockies came in 1993 and the Diamondbacks in 1998, along with the White Sox from Sarasota. Kansas City and Texas left Florida together for Surprise in 2003. In 2009 the Dodgers gave up Vero Beach after 61 years, and Cleveland came back. Cincinnati followed in 2010, and the count has been level ever since.

Shared complexes and who pays for them

Clubs do not build these parks. Cities, counties and states do, and the clubs sign leases.

Arizona's turn came in 1991, when the legislature let Maricopa County levy a surcharge on rental cars to pay for spring training facilities, a tax that falls mostly on visitors. Peoria's two-club complex was the first fruit of it. In 2000, Arizona voters approved a broader measure that created what is now the Arizona Sports and Tourism Authority, funded by hotel and rental-car taxes, with Cactus League construction among its purposes alongside the football stadium in Glendale. Surprise, Goodyear and Camelback Ranch followed, with the host cities carrying much of the debt themselves.

Florida uses a state program under which a certified spring training facility receives a share of state sales-tax revenue over a period of decades, added to whatever the county raises from its tax on hotel stays. The mechanism differs. The logic is the same.

1. 1A lease nears its endThe club lets it be known that its current park is dated and that other cities have been in touch.
2. 2A city makes an offerLand, a stadium and practice fields, usually with a second club recruited to share the cost and double the dates.
3. 3Public money is assembledTourism taxes on hotel rooms and rental cars, state funds, and bonds issued by the host city or county.
4. 4The club signs a long leaseCommonly 20 years or more. The public owns the stadium and the club controls its own training side.
5. 5The old host is left with a ballparkSome find a new club. Others convert the site to college, amateur or minor-league use.

The common sequence in both states. Terms differ from deal to deal and no figures are given because each agreement sets its own.

The case cities make is tourism. A club's fans fly in for a week in March, fill hotels and restaurants, and go home, and both states publish studies putting a large annual figure on that spending. The studies are commissioned by the bodies that benefit from the answer. Economists who study stadium subsidies have been consistently skeptical of such numbers, on the grounds that many of those visitors would have come to Arizona or Florida in March for the weather anyway. Both things can be true: spring training plainly fills hotel rooms, and a city can still overpay for it.

What is not in doubt is the leverage. With two states competing and several cities in each, a club approaching the end of a lease has rarely had to accept the first offer. The list of places left behind is long: Vero Beach, Winter Haven, Kissimmee, Fort Lauderdale, St. Petersburg, Tucson.

The old and the new: Bradenton and Lakeland against the modern complexes

The Pirates' park in Bradenton opened in 1923. It is the oldest ballpark in use for spring training, a small Spanish Mission-style grandstand in a residential neighborhood, with houses across the street and the practice complex in a different part of town. For most of its life it was called McKechnie Field, after Bill McKechnie, the Hall of Fame manager who retired to the city. It has been modernized several times and still feels like a ballpark from before air conditioning.

Lakeland's tie with the Tigers is the longest in the sport between a club and a spring city. Detroit first trained there in 1934 and, apart from the wartime years when clubs stayed north, has been back every spring since. The present stadium dates from 1966 and is named for Marcus "Joker" Marchant, the city parks director who oversaw it. The surrounding complex, Tigertown, stands on a former wartime flight school.

Against these stand the complexes of the last two decades, in Arizona especially. They are campuses: a stadium of 10,000 seats or more surrounded by a dozen practice fields, vast weight rooms, and rehabilitation facilities that injured players use all year. They are comfortable and handsome and, it has to be said, somewhat alike. A fan dropped blindfolded into three of the newer Arizona parks would struggle to say which was which.

Florida's newer parks have made more effort to be particular. The Red Sox' park in Fort Myers, opened in 2012, reproduces the dimensions of their Boston home, including a left-field wall modeled on the Green Monster with seats built into it, the original of which is described in our history of Fenway Park. The Yankees' field in Tampa copies the outfield dimensions of Yankee Stadium. The idea in both cases is practical as much as sentimental, since outfielders can learn the caroms they will play all summer.

Something was lost in the consolidation. Dodgertown in Vero Beach, where from 1948 the Dodgers housed an entire organization on a converted naval air station, went dark as a spring site after 2008 and is now a training complex run by MLB and named for Jackie Robinson. St. Petersburg's waterfront park, home at various times to the Yankees and Cardinals, is a soccer stadium.

Why the standings mean nothing

Both circuits publish standings, newspapers print them, and nothing follows. No pennant is awarded that anyone remembers by April and no club has ever cited one. A spring game level after nine innings can be left as a tie, which tells you how much the result is worth. The bodies behind the two names are promotional ones, an association of host cities and clubs in Arizona and a state sports foundation in Florida, and their job is to market the games and coordinate facilities. Neither crowns anyone. How the exhibition games themselves are run is covered in our guide to how MLB spring training works.

Even as a rough measure, the tables are compromised from the start. Schedules are unbalanced, because clubs play whoever is nearest. Split-squad games count, so a club can win and lose on the same afternoon with two rosters, neither of them its real one. The late innings of most games are played by minor leaguers, whose rise through the system is traced in our explainer on minor league baseball from the complex to Triple-A. And clubs fill out their calendars with opponents who are outside the standings altogether: college teams, such as the Florida Southern side the Tigers have long hosted in Lakeland, and national teams in World Baseball Classic years.

One oddity is worth knowing. Long before interleague play began in the regular season in 1997, American and National League clubs met every day in March. For most of the twentieth century spring training was one of the very few places outside the World Series where a fan could see the Yankees play the Cardinals.

The last exhibitions, away from both states

The final two or three days of the exhibition schedule usually leave Arizona and Florida. Clubs head for home and stop to play on the way: in their own stadiums, at a Triple-A affiliate's park, or against a neighbor. The Dodgers and Angels close most springs with the Freeway Series in Southern California. Cities without a team have been used for these games as well, among them Montreal, where the Blue Jays played at Olympic Stadium for several years in the 2010s, and Las Vegas. These count in nobody's standings either.

Choosing between Arizona and Florida as a visitor

For volume, Arizona. A visitor based anywhere in Greater Phoenix has 15 clubs within an hour's drive, and on most days six or seven games to choose from. On the occasional evening when one park schedules a night game, two in a day is practical. Four days is enough to see eight or ten different clubs without checking out of a hotel.

Florida requires a decision before the flight is booked. The sensible approach is to pick a region and stay in it.

• Tampa Bay gives the Blue Jays, Phillies and Yankees close together, with the Tigers an hour inland and the Pirates and Orioles about an hour south.
• Fort Myers gives the Twins and Red Sox in one city, with the Rays and Braves up the road.
• Palm Beach County gives four clubs in two parks a short drive apart, and the Mets under an hour north.

Trying to combine the Gulf and Atlantic sides in a short trip mostly produces a view of the interior from a rental car.

Florida's case is different in kind. It is the choice for someone who follows one club and wants to see it properly: the same park three days running, the morning workouts, the feel of a small town that has had the same team since before the visitor was born. Arizona is easier, and it is more of a sampler.

When in March to go

The answer is the same in both states. In the first week of games, at the end of February, regulars bat twice and are gone by the fifth inning. From about the second week of March starting pitchers are working five innings and everyday players are staying in for most of the game, and that stretch, through roughly March 20, is when an exhibition most resembles the real thing. The final days are thinner again, as clubs rest players and begin leaving.

Two cautions. Home games are the ones to buy, in Florida above all, because that is where a club's regulars play. And in a World Baseball Classic year, many of the best-known players are absent from camp for part of March, playing for their countries.

Our United States guides hub has the other pages in this series, including the rest of the baseball calendar.