THE MINOR LEAGUE OUTFIELDER jumps rope with great efficiency in the Fort Myers, Florida, sunshine. A rhythm seems to play through his head, a syncopation that keeps the leather rope moving in an almost invisible blur. His hands control the wooden handles at his sides, his feet move and dance. He has a determined look on his face, serious. A rolled-up bandana is tied around his head to keep the sweat from running into his eyes.
Take away the uniform of the Boston Red Sox, the practice edition with the red shirt and gray pants, and he could be a welterweight boxer, maybe a middleweight, training for a shot at the title. Leave the uniform on, though, and he looks a bit strange. He is a baseball player.
Jumping rope?
"We didn't do that," Hall of Fame hitter Jim Rice says while watching the kid from the driver's seat of a golf cart. "None of us did it. I'd show up to spring training, get my glove and go in the field, get that 36-36 [his 36-inch, 36-ounce bat], and go in the cage and start swinging. That was it."
"No one did this," a teammate from the 1970s, pitcher Luis Tiant, agrees from the passenger seat. "No one jumped rope. No one lifted weights. Try to lift weights?—?they'd tell you to stop."
"We got in shape to play baseball by playing baseball," left-handed onetime philosopher Bill Lee adds, part of the group.
The place where the minor league outfielder does his work this day is a stretch of artificial turf outside the weight room at JetBlue Park, the Red Sox' new spring training home. Inside the room are all the toys of modern fitness training: the large inflated balls, the polyester tubes to aid in rolling around the floor, the mats, the barbells, the assortment of resistance machines, grim and foreboding.
Every morning, the players spill out of the room to do various exercises, bending and pushing, twisting and sliding, then go back into the room to do more. On the fields, there are further drills, one special area lined like a football field just for workouts, rows of players sprinting or skipping, not a baseball or bat in sight. Little plastic cones are laid out as obstacles in some of the drills. Little plastic cones?
The old world smiles at this new world. The old world has a combined 49 big league seasons of experience.
"I went to spring training with Cleveland for the first time in 1964," Tiant says. "I'd been 15-1 in Triple A at Portland [Oregon]. I had a little eight-pound weight I sometimes used in my room. Built up my arm a little. I had a five-pound weighted baseball that I sometimes threw in the outfield, because when you did that, the real baseball felt like nothing. The trainer told me not to do either of them, they were not good for you. I said: ‘I was 15-1 in Portland doing this. Forget about you, I'm doing it here.' "
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