MLB Spring Training Explained: Dates, Rosters and Rules

On February 25, 2023, at the Atlanta Braves' spring park in North Port, Florida, a game ended with the bases loaded, two out and a full count in the bottom of the ninth, and no pitch thrown. Braves infielder Cal Conley was not set in the batter's box with eight seconds left on a pitch clock that Major League Baseball had been using in big-league games since the day before. The plate umpire called an automatic third strike. The score was 6-6, nobody suggested a tenth inning, and both clubs walked off. A rule on trial, in a game whose result counted for nothing. That is spring training in a single play.

Spring training is the preseason that MLB's 30 clubs hold every February and March, 15 of them in Arizona and 15 in Florida. It lasts about six weeks. Pitchers and catchers report in mid-February, position players a few days later, and each club then plays roughly 30 exhibition games between the last third of February and the final days of March. None of them count, in the standings or in anyone's career statistics. A camp opens with the 40-man roster plus a couple of dozen non-roster invitees and closes when that crowd has been cut to the 26 players who start the regular season.

What spring training in baseball is actually for

Ask a hitter how long he needs to get ready and the honest answer is two or three weeks. Fifty at-bats, give or take. Players no longer arrive in February fifteen pounds heavy after a winter selling insurance, which was the original reason clubs took them south. They report in condition, most having hit and thrown for a month already at private facilities.

Camp is six weeks long because of starting pitchers. An arm that will be asked to throw 90 or 100 pitches on Opening Day weekend cannot get there in a fortnight without getting hurt, so the calendar is built backward from the rotation: five or six turns, each a little longer than the last, with normal rest in between. Everything else in spring training fits itself around that schedule.

The second purpose is sorting. A club comes to camp knowing perhaps 20 of its 26 Opening Day names. The exhibition games are how it decides the rest, and how it ranks the next 15 players it will call on when someone is hurt in May.

Then there is the plain business of repetition. Bunt defenses, relay throws, pickoff signs, a catcher learning nine new pitchers. Most of this happens before ten in the morning on practice fields the public rarely looks at, and it is the part managers say they value most.

What the players are paid for it

Not their salaries. A major league contract pays its salary across the regular season, so a player in camp receives allowances instead: a weekly allowance and meal money, with a supplement for those who do not live at the club's hotel. Players still call it Murphy money, after Robert Murphy, the lawyer whose attempt to organize a players' union in 1946 frightened owners into granting a spring allowance in the first place. The amounts are set by the Basic Agreement between MLB and the Major League Baseball Players Association and rise with each new deal.

The two exhibition circuits have names, the Cactus League in Arizona and the Grapefruit League in Florida, and our comparison of which clubs train in which state covers the ballparks and the geography. This page is about the camp itself.

When does spring training start? The calendar from report day to Opening Day

Report dates are staggered. Pitchers and catchers come first, in the second or third week of February, because pitchers need the longest runway and somebody has to catch them. Position players are due four or five days later. The first full-squad workout follows within a day or two, and games begin before the end of the month.

1. 1Early arrivalsInjured players and many pitchers show up in the first days of February on a voluntary basis. Nothing requires them to.
2. 2Pitchers and catchers reportMid-February. Physicals come first, then bullpen sessions on a fixed rotation.
3. 3Position players reportFour or five days later. The first full-squad workout marks the formal start of camp.
4. 4Exhibition games beginThe last third of February. Starters throw an inning or two and regulars leave after a couple of at-bats.
5. 5Minor-league camp opensEarly March, on the back fields of the same complex. The first cuts from big-league camp are sent there.
6. 6Rosters are setThe final week of March. Clubs break camp and must be down to 26 active players by Opening Day.

The usual order of events under the current Basic Agreement. Exact dates move every year with the regular-season schedule and are published by each club.

The Basic Agreement governs how early a club can require anyone to appear. It sets a mandatory reporting date counted in days back from Opening Day, with an earlier window in which pitchers, catchers and injured players may be invited but not compelled. In practice the voluntary window is the real one. A pitcher fighting for a job who turns up on the mandatory date has already told the club something.

How long spring training lasts

About six weeks from report day to the last exhibition, with games on roughly 30 of the final 33 or so days. Clubs get one or two scheduled days off. The exhibition schedule ends a day or two before Opening Day, which since 2018 has usually fallen in the last week of March, earlier than the first week of April that older fans remember. Add the 162 games described in our guide to the length of the MLB regular season and a player on a club that reaches the World Series is in uniform from mid-February to the end of October.

The calendar has broken three times in living memory. In 1995, with the players' strike unresolved, clubs opened camps with replacement players; the strike ended at the start of April, the real players had a spring of about three weeks, and the season was cut to 144 games. In 2020 exhibition play stopped on March 12 and resumed as a three-week "summer camp" in July. And in 2022 the owners' lockout kept camps closed until the second week of March, which pushed Opening Day back to April 7. Each time the same constraint decided the length of the restart: how fast starting pitchers could be built up.

Who is in camp: the 40-man roster and the non-roster invitee

Every player on a club's 40-man roster is invited to major league camp automatically. That is the reserve list of players under major league contract, and the mechanics of it are set out in our explainer on the 26-man and 40-man rosters. On top of those 40 the club invites others. These are the non-roster invitees, the NRIs, and they come in two kinds.

The first kind is the prospect. A 21-year-old shortstop who finished last season in Double-A is not on the 40-man roster and is not going to make the team, but the front office wants him to spend three weeks around big-league players and coaches. He will be sent out early and knows it.

The second kind is the veteran on a minor-league contract. He is 31, he has five years in the majors, nobody offered him a guaranteed deal over the winter, and he signed for the chance to win a job. His contract usually names the salary he will earn if he makes the club. If he does not, he can often leave.

• 30Clubs holding camps
• 40Players on the reserve list
• 26Active roster on Opening Day
• 13Pitchers allowed on it

Roster limits under the current Basic Agreement. Camp rosters themselves have no fixed size and commonly run past 60.

Put the 40 and the invitees together and a clubhouse in the third week of February holds 60 players or more. Catchers are heavily overrepresented, because every bullpen session needs one. You can pick out the invitees from the stands: they wear numbers in the 70s, 80s and 90s, the ones no established player wants.

Making the team as an NRI takes two steps where a rostered player needs one. He has to be good enough, and the club has to find him a place on the 40-man roster, which is described on the transaction wire as having his contract selected. If the 40 is full, somebody comes off. This is why a veteran invitee can out-hit a rostered rival all month and still lose: the rival costs nothing to keep.

One device opens places for free. Once camps begin, a player facing a long absence can be put on the 60-day injured list, which removes him from the 40-man count, and clubs with a pitcher recovering from elbow surgery make that move in the first days of camp. The details are in our guide to the 10-day, 15-day and 60-day injured lists.

Reading the cuts: optioned, reassigned to minor-league camp, released

Cuts come in waves. A first group goes out in the opening week of March, when minor-league camp begins and there is somewhere to send them. A second and third follow at intervals of a week or so. The final decisions are made in the last four or five days, and those are the ones with consequences.

Clubs announce all of them in the same flat language, and each phrase means something different for the player.

Phrase on the transaction line	Who it applies to	What happens to him
Optioned to Triple-A	A 40-man player with an option year left	Goes to the minors, stays on the 40-man roster, can be recalled
Reassigned to minor-league camp	A non-roster invitee	Moves to the back fields; no option is used because he was never on the 40
Contract selected	A non-roster invitee who made the club	Added to the 40-man and active rosters
Designated for assignment	A 40-man player the club has no room for	Removed from the 40; the club has seven days to trade, waive or release him
Outrighted	A 40-man player who cleared waivers	Sent to the minors and taken off the 40-man roster
Released	Anyone	Contract ended; free to sign with any club
Returned	A Rule 5 pick who did not make it	Offered back to his original organization

"Optioned" is the mildest. The player is still on the 40-man roster, still on a major league contract, and can be back in an afternoon. What he loses is the big-league salary and the service time for each day he spends down. An option year is used up only if he spends 20 days or more in the minors on optional assignment during the season, a threshold explained in our piece on waivers and minor league options.

"Reassigned" sounds like the same thing and is not. It applies to players who were never on the 40, so there is no option to use and no recall to make. For the prospect it is routine. For the veteran on a minor-league deal it is the moment his contract's escape clauses matter. Certain veterans with enough major league service who sign minor-league contracts as free agents are protected by the Basic Agreement itself, which gives them fixed opt-out dates, the first a few days before Opening Day and the others during the season, on which a player still in the minors can ask to be let go. The terms of that protection have been rewritten from one labor deal to the next. Others negotiate an opt-out individually. Either way, "reassigned" in the last week of March is often followed two days later by "released at his own request."

What a release costs the club

It depends on the contract. A guaranteed deal is owed in full whatever happens. A non-guaranteed major league contract is another matter, and the Basic Agreement's termination-pay schedule covers it: a player released during spring training 16 days or more before the season opens is owed 30 days' pay at his salary rate, and one released inside the final 15 days is owed 45 days' pay. A player on a minor-league contract is owed what that contract says, which is frequently nothing further.

That schedule is why a certain kind of release clusters about two and a half weeks before Opening Day. It is cheaper then.

How spring training games differ from regular-season games

The rulebook is the same. Three strikes, nine innings, the pitch clock, the designated hitter in both leagues. What changes is how the two managers use it, and a handful of operating rules the league relaxes because nothing is at stake.

	Spring training game	Regular-season game
Standings	Does not count	Counts
Statistics	Kept separately from career totals	Official
Level after nine innings	May end as a tie	Extra innings until someone wins
Players in uniform	Anyone in camp, often 40 or more	The 26 on the active roster
Regulars' workload	Two or three at-bats early in camp	The whole game
Two games in a day	Split squad, two different rosters	Doubleheader, one roster

Watch an exhibition in the first week and the lineup changes wholesale in the fifth inning. The regulars bat twice, sometimes three times, run their sprints in the outfield and are showered before the seventh. Their replacements are minor leaguers brought over from the back fields for the afternoon, some of whom will be in Class A in April.

Substitution rules are honored in the official games, mostly. A player removed is out. But managers trade lineup cards with a courtesy unknown in July, agreeing in advance who will pitch which inning and occasionally letting a hitter take an extra at-bat in a lost cause.

Split-squad days

Early in camp a club has too many players for one game, so the schedule gives it two. The roster is divided, one half stays home, the other boards a bus, and the listings carry the abbreviation "ss" beside both. Coaches are divided as well, and one of them manages whichever half the manager is not with. For a fan, the split-squad flag is a warning: the lineup you paid to see may be 80 miles away.

B games and back-field games

A "B game" is an informal exhibition played in the morning on a practice field, with no admission charge, no public-address announcer and no official box score. Clubs arrange them to get extra innings for pitchers who would not otherwise be seen.

Minor-league games on the back fields are looser still, and big-league pitchers use them deliberately. A starter who needs exactly 75 pitches can throw them there under controlled conditions. Innings can be ended on a pitch count regardless of outs. A hitter coming back from injury can lead off every inning for both teams, and frequently does.

Do spring training games count?

No, and the tie rule is the clearest sign. A game level after nine innings can stop there. Managers may agree to a tenth when both have pitchers who need the work, and the tenth is ordinarily the limit, but nobody is going to burn a reliever's arm to settle an exhibition. The operating details are issued by the league each spring and have shifted over the years, including a period in 2021 when clubs could agree to shorten games below nine innings. The principle has not moved. The result does not matter, so the rules about reaching one are optional.

What pitchers are doing in February and March

The first bullpen session of spring is 25 or 30 pitches, all fastballs and changeups, thrown at something well short of full effort. From there a starter climbs a staircase. Live batting practice against his own teammates. Then a first game of an inning or two, and a turn every fifth day after that, each a step longer.

First start2innings

Second start3innings

Third start4innings

Fourth start5innings

Fifth start6innings

An illustrative progression, not a rule. Clubs set each pitcher's schedule individually and count pitches more closely than innings.

Show the numbers

A typical starter's build-up across five spring turns

Item	Value
First start	2innings
Second start	3innings
Third start	4innings
Fourth start	5innings
Fifth start	6innings

Pitch counts are the real target. A starter is trying to finish camp having thrown somewhere near 90 in a game, and if he gets through his scheduled innings too quickly he will walk down to the bullpen afterward and throw 15 more to an empty plate. If an inning runs long, he may be pulled from it and sent back out for the next one in a back-field game, which the rules of a real game would never allow.

Relievers are on a different program. They need fewer pitches and more appearances, and the test a club wants to see before the end of March is whether a man can pitch on consecutive days. Our guide to bullpen roles from closer to long man explains what each of those jobs requires once the season starts.

Why a spring ERA tells you so little

A veteran starter might throw 20 innings all spring. Over a sample that small, two bad afternoons are the entire stat line. That alone would be reason enough to distrust it, and there are three more.

He is not pitching to win. A starter with a secure job will spend a whole outing throwing a pitch he does not yet trust, a new cutter or a changeup with a different grip, in counts where he would never risk it in May. He gets hit. He wanted the information.

The hitters are uneven. The first three innings are thrown to big-league lineups and the last three to players from Double-A, so a reliever who works the eighth every day is facing a different sport from the starter. Baseball-Reference publishes an opponent-quality rating beside its spring statistics for exactly this reason.

And the conditions are odd. Arizona's thin, dry air flatters hitters, the infields are hard, and the wind in Florida blows out in March. The statistic itself is sound, as our explainer on what ERA measures and how it is calculated sets out, but it needs innings to mean anything and spring does not supply them.

What scouts watch instead is cruder and more reliable: velocity compared with last March, whether the breaking ball has its shape, whether he is throwing strikes.

Position battles and the roster bubble

Most of a roster is settled before the first workout. The interesting part of camp is the three or four places that are not: the fifth starter, the last two relievers, the backup catcher, a fourth outfielder. Around each sits a small group of candidates, and their chances are less equal than the box scores suggest.

Players who are out of options. A player whose option years are used up cannot be sent to the minors without first being offered to the other 29 clubs on waivers. Keep him or risk losing him for nothing. Faced with two similar relievers, one of whom can be stored in Triple-A and one of whom cannot, a club will almost always keep the one it would otherwise lose and option the other, whoever pitched better in March. Check the option status before believing any report of an open competition.

Rule 5 picks. A player taken in the major league phase of the December Rule 5 draft has to stay on his new club's active roster for the whole following season. He cannot be optioned. If the club decides in March that he is not ready, it must put him on waivers and, if he clears, offer him back to his original organization for $50,000, half of the $100,000 it paid to draft him. Camp is therefore a six-week audition with an unusually blunt ending, and the terms are laid out in our guide to how the Rule 5 draft works.

Prospects. The player who hits .400 in March and is sent to Triple-A anyway. Sometimes the club simply wants him playing every day instead of sitting on a big-league bench. Sometimes the reason is the calendar.

A player needs 172 days on a major league roster to be credited with a year of service, and a season contains only a couple of weeks more than that. Hold a rookie in the minors for the first fortnight and he finishes the year a few days short, which pushes his free agency back by a full season. The textbook case is Kris Bryant in 2015. He led all of spring training with nine home runs, was optioned to Triple-A Iowa by the Chicago Cubs, and was called up on April 17. He ended that season with 171 days of service, one short. The union filed a grievance on his behalf and an arbitrator ruled for the club in early 2020.

The 2022 Basic Agreement tried to change the incentive without banning the practice. A top-rated prospect who breaks camp with his club and then wins Rookie of the Year, or finishes high in the Most Valuable Player or Cy Young voting, earns that club an extra draft pick, and a top-rated prospect who finishes first or second in the rookie vote is credited with a full year of service however late he was called up. Seattle collected the first such pick after Julio Rodríguez's 2022 season. How the service clock runs is covered in our explainer on the 172-day service year.

Do spring results predict the regular season?

Shohei Ohtani's first American spring, with the Los Angeles Angels in 2018, was by the numbers a failure. He batted .125 in Cactus League games. In his official pitching appearances his ERA was 27.00. Scouts quoted anonymously wondered whether he could hit big-league pitching at all, and some said he should open in the minors. He was the American League Rookie of the Year that November.

Team records are no better a guide. A club's March winning percentage has almost no relationship to its record over the following six months, and the reason is visible in any box score: by the sixth inning the game is being decided by players who will spend the summer in Double-A. A spring record measures the depth of a farm system on a given afternoon more than it measures the team that will take the field in April. It is not rare for a club with one of the best records in the desert to lose 90 games.

Individual lines carry slightly more information, and only in particular places. Rates that settle quickly, such as how often a pitcher strikes hitters out or how often a hitter does, have shown a faint signal in studies of spring data, and a presentation at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in 2015 argued that those spring numbers were worth a small adjustment to a player's forecast. Batting average and ERA, the two figures most often quoted in March, are the two that mean least.

The useful spring signals are physical. A fastball that has gained or lost two miles an hour since last year is real, because velocity does not depend on the opponent. So is a new pitch that big-league hitters swing through in the first three innings. A .380 average over 40 at-bats is not evidence of very much.

Clubs treat their own spring numbers the same way. Front offices collect pitch-tracking data from every exhibition, back fields included, and what they study are the measurements that do not need a large sample: spin, movement, release point, how hard a ball was hit.

Spring as a laboratory: the pitch clock and the ball-strike challenge system

Because the games do not count, MLB uses them to put new rules in front of major league players before the standings depend on them. The pitch clock is the best example and also the one most often misdescribed, because spring training was the end of its trial and not the beginning.

1. 1Arizona Fall League, 2014The clock is tried in the prospect league, where few fans are watching and nothing is at stake.
2. 2Double-A and Triple-A, 2015A 20-second clock becomes standard at the top two levels of the minor leagues.
3. 3Spring training, 2019Big-league exhibitions run a clock without penalties. The league and the union shelve it for the season.
4. 4Minor leagues, 2022A stricter clock, with a ball or a strike charged for each violation, is enforced across the minors and game times fall sharply.
5. 5Spring training, 2023The first big-league games with enforcement. Players have a month to adjust before it counts.
6. 6Opening Day, 2023The pitch timer, the larger bases and the limits on defensive shifts take effect together.

The main public stages of the trial. Timer lengths changed along the way and were adjusted again for 2024.

That month of exhibition games in 2023 mattered. Violations were frequent in the first week, among them the called third strike that ended the Braves' game in North Port, and had dropped steeply by the last. Hitters learned to be in the box and looking at the pitcher with eight seconds left. Pitchers learned how many times they could step off. By Opening Day the argument about whether players could adapt was over, settled in games nobody would remember. The rule itself is set out in our explainer on the MLB pitch clock and what it changed.

The ball-strike challenge system followed the same route a few years later. After seasons of testing in the minor leagues, MLB installed it for spring training in 2025 at 13 ballparks, the homes of 19 clubs, so that major league hitters and catchers could try tapping their helmets to appeal a call. Each side had two challenges and kept any it won. It appeared again at that summer's All-Star Game, the competition committee approved it in September 2025, and it took effect in the majors for the 2026 season. How the zone is measured is the subject of our piece on the automated ball-strike system.

Going to spring training as a fan

The parks are small. Most hold somewhere between about 7,000 and 12,000 people, and the largest, the Cubs' park in Mesa, Arizona, has room for roughly 15,000. A seat in the last row is closer to the plate than a good seat in the upper deck of a major league stadium. Many have a grass berm beyond the outfield wall where people bring a blanket and watch from the ground.

The game is the smaller half of the day. Gates to the practice fields at most complexes open in the morning, hours before first pitch, and what happens there is what regular-season crowds never see: forty pitchers taking fielding practice in rotation, a coach hitting ground balls to a Gold Glove shortstop from 60 feet, a hitter working through a cage session with the hitting coach talking the whole time. Watching is generally free. Minor-league camp, on the fields farthest from the stadium, is usually open as well, and is where to find the players who will be in the majors two years from now. Players walk between fields along roped paths, and that walk is where autographs happen.

Three things a first-time visitor gets wrong.

Stars play at home. Established players rarely make long bus trips, so the road team's lineup, especially in Florida, is heavy with reserves. Visiting clubs are expected to bring a few recognizable names and seldom bring more. To see a particular club's regulars, go to that club's home games.

Early is not better. In the last days of February the regulars bat twice and leave. By the middle of March starters are throwing five innings and lineups stay in for six or seven. The last two or three days of camp swing back the other way, as clubs rest people and pack.

Day games dominate, and the sun is serious. Most first pitches are around one in the afternoon local time, and shade is the first thing regulars look for on a seating chart.

For more on the American game beyond baseball, our United States guides hub collects the rest of this series.

Injuries, the Classic and the last week of camp

No camp finishes with the roster it planned. Somebody strains an oblique in the second week, a starter's elbow barks in the fourth, and the depth chart drawn up in January is redrawn in pencil.

The injured list is the tool for the end of camp. A player who is not ready for Opening Day can be placed on it, and the placement can be backdated a few days into spring training so that he is eligible to return early in April. Clubs use this as a roster device as much as a medical one: a fifth starter with a mild strain can open on the injured list, the club carries an extra reliever through an early-season stretch with days off, and the starter is activated the first time a fifth turn is needed.

Every few years the World Baseball Classic takes a different kind of bite. The tournament is played in March, most recently in 2023 and 2026, and players on national teams leave their camps for it, so a club can open its exhibition schedule with half its lineup in another country. The Classic limits pitch counts round by round, a concession to the clubs lending their pitchers in the middle of a build-up. A player coming off an injury may be unable to take part at all if the tournament's insurer will not cover his contract, which kept Clayton Kershaw out in 2023.

Then there are the final exhibitions. Many clubs leave Arizona or Florida two or three days early and play their last games somewhere else: in their own big-league park, at a Triple-A affiliate's stadium, or against the neighbor down the freeway. Since 2024 the schedule has also included Spring Breakout, a set of games in mid-March in which each organization's best prospects play another's, a showcase for the players described in our guide to the minor league ladder from the complex to Triple-A.

The last cut is usually made a day or two before Opening Day, after the club has seen who came through the final exhibition healthy. Until then the 26th man is packing for two cities.

Where spring training came from: Hot Springs, Florida and the war years

Clubs went south to get warm. Northern clubs were making preseason trips to New Orleans by about 1870, and accounts differ on which went first, but the habit took hold in 1886, when Cap Anson took the Chicago White Stockings, the club now called the Cubs, to Hot Springs, Arkansas. The idea was to boil the winter out of his players in the mineral baths and walk them over the hills. Other clubs followed, and for four decades Hot Springs was the nearest thing baseball had to a spring capital.

Florida came next, and slowly. The Washington club trained in Jacksonville in 1888. The Cubs went to Tampa in 1913, and in 1914 a promoter and future mayor named Al Lang persuaded the St. Louis Browns to come to St. Petersburg, which began that city's long run as a spring town. By the 1920s most clubs were somewhere in the state and sportswriters had started calling the exhibition circuit the Grapefruit League. The Cubs were an exception from the 1920s until they moved to Arizona in the 1950s: the Wrigley family owned Catalina Island, off the California coast, and trained the club there.

The camps that stayed north

In 1943, with railroads needed for troops and war materiel, Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis and Joseph Eastman of the Office of Defense Transportation agreed that clubs would train close to home. The boundary ran along the Potomac and Ohio rivers and the Mississippi, and for three springs big-league baseball prepared in the snow.

Club	Wartime spring camp
New York Yankees	Asbury Park, New Jersey, then Atlantic City
Brooklyn Dodgers	Bear Mountain, New York
Chicago Cubs and Chicago White Sox	French Lick, Indiana
St. Louis Cardinals	Cairo, Illinois
Detroit Tigers	Evansville, Indiana
Cincinnati Reds	Bloomington, Indiana
Cleveland Indians	Lafayette, Indiana

Clubs worked out in college field houses when the fields were frozen, the Dodgers at West Point, across the river from Bear Mountain.

Arizona and after

The clubs went back south in 1946, and a year later two of them chose a different south. Bill Veeck's Cleveland Indians set up in Tucson and the New York Giants in Phoenix for the spring of 1947, the founding of what became the Cactus League. A single club had tried Arizona before, the Detroit Tigers in Phoenix in 1929, and had not returned. Veeck's reasons had a good deal to do with segregation in Florida, a story told on our Cactus and Grapefruit page and, from the Brooklyn side, in our account of Jackie Robinson and the color barrier. The Dodgers' own answer was Dodgertown, a former naval air station in Vero Beach, Florida, that Branch Rickey turned into a self-contained camp in 1948 where the whole organization could live and eat on one site.

Dodgertown was also the model for the modern complex: a stadium, a ring of practice fields, a clubhouse and dormitories on a single property, used all year by the minor-league operation. Every club has one now. The split between the states reached 15 and 15 in 2010 and has stayed there. More of the sport's background sits on our baseball hub.