Hot Springs and Major League Baseball: The Spring Training Capital

Beginning in eighteen eighty-six, Hot Springs became the place where major-league baseball teams came to shake off winter. The thermal baths offered something that spring training in a warm Southern city couldn't quite replicate: genuine therapeutic treatment for joints that had stiffened through months of cold and inactivity. The Boston Beaneaters, the Brooklyn Superbas, the Cincinnati Reds, and eventually clubs from across both leagues made the journey to Hot Springs each February and March, soaking in the Edwardian bathhouses by day and playing exhibition games on the local fields.

Babe Ruth trained at Hot Springs multiple times during his career. The combination of therapeutic bathing, serious athletic preparation, the city's gambling establishments, and a general permissiveness about what players did in the evenings made Hot Springs a singular environment in American professional sports. Players who had been told for decades that athletic performance and the medicinal water were linked took the baths with the seriousness of a treatment protocol.

Hot Springs held its status as the spring training capital for roughly four decades. Florida's warmer and more reliable climate, combined with its geographic convenience for clubs based along the East Coast, eventually drew the teams south. By the nineteen thirties, Hot Springs had largely ceded spring training to the Florida circuit, which became the Grapefruit League, and the teams never came back.

The thermal water still flows at the same temperature it always did. What the athletes believed about it may have been mostly myth, but the water was real.