What treasures await?

Hot Springs is finally getting the recognition it deserves as the birthplace of spring training for Major League Baseball.

Larry Foley's exceptional documentary on the subject, "The First Boys of Spring," narrated by Billy Bob Thornton, will be broadcast nationally next month on the Major League Baseball Network.

For those not familiar with Hot Springs' ties to spring training, here's a synopsis from Visit Hot Springs: "for parts of five decades, the immortals of America's National Pastime trained on baseball diamonds and 'boiled out the alcoholic microbes' of winter in the thermal baths of Hot Springs. In 1886, The Chicago White Stockings were the first to trek south to Hot Springs, when the team's owner and manager decided the boys needed a place to practice and get ready for the season ahead. Other teams soon followed, including the Boston Red Sox, Pittsburg Pirates, Brooklyn Dodgers and many others."

It's safe to say that local historians have known about Hot Springs' pioneering role in spring training for more than a decade, but only recently has the connection gotten the attention it so richly deserves. The question nagged at me: How did such a great story languish in relative obscurity for so long?

I started rummaging through our archives after the news about the documentary came out, because I honestly couldn't recall when the story about spring training first appeared. I eventually came to the same conclusion as Steve Arrison, CEO of Visit Hot Springs: local historians have known about it for a number of years, but the idea of Hot Springs as the birthplace of spring training didn't really "click" until 2009 -- more about that in a moment.

The first I wrote on the subject was no more than a footnote in a story about, believe it or not, boxing, published in March 2002.

Arrison had sent a letter to Lennox Lewis' management company to invite the heavyweight champion to set up his training camp in the Spa, citing its natural setting and long boxing history. His letter pointed out that other athletes such as Babe Ruth trained in the city "long before Florida and Arizona had become spring training meccas."

Now for 2009, when it all "clicked."

That was the year Gregg Patterson, editor of Arkansas Farm Bureau's Front Porch magazine, wrote an article about Hot Springs as a spring training destination. Patterson was looking for photographs to go with the piece and discovered the George Grantham Bain Collection at the Library of Congress.

The photographs from that collection became the basis for "Hot Springs: Baseball's First Spring Training Town" an exhibit at the Hot Springs Convention Center that was sponsored by Arkansas Farm Bureau, Garland County Historical Society, and the CVB.

Patterson is the nephew of Arthur "Red" Patterson who, as PR director for the New York Yankees in 1953, started what became known as "Tape Measure" home runs when he retrieved the ball and estimated the distance of Mickey Mantle's mammoth shot in Washington, D.C.'s Griffith Stadium off Senators' pitcher Chuck Stobbs.

From that simple beginning of a wall of photographs, Visit Hot Springs, using research gathered over the course of years by baseball historians Bill Jenkinson, of Pennsylvania, Tim Reid, of Florida, Don Duren, of Dallas, and Mark Blaeuer and Mike Dugan, both of Hot Springs, around three years ago created Hot Springs' Historic Baseball Trail, which uses a series of plaques and electronic databases to trace the city's links to baseball immortals such as Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Stan Musial, Al Simmons, Tris Speaker, Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron and other legendary players.

And last year, Visit Hot Springs and the Arkansas Humanities Council joined with Foley to produce "The First Boys of Spring," which premiered during the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival.

"We have always known about the gangster/gambling history of Hot Springs," Arrison told me Friday. "We now know all about the baseball history of our city. The question is what else is out there that we have yet to discover? Not too many communities/cities have the rich history that we do that is really national not just local history and of those the history is just in one area. We are across the board in all sorts of areas of national interest. Incredible!"

Incredible, indeed. Who knows what other treasures are buried in the past?

Editorial on 01/17/2016

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