Terry Park: One Hundred Years of Spring Training

Fort Myers has been welcoming Major League Baseball teams to spring training for more than a century, and the story of how that started involves one of the greatest managers in the history of the game.

In nineteen twenty-three, Lee County officials convinced Connie Mack to bring his Philadelphia Athletics to Fort Myers. Mack was already a legend. He had managed the Athletics since nineteen hundred and would continue until nineteen fifty, winning five World Series along the way. The county used plans that Mack himself provided to design Terry Park, which opened in nineteen twenty-five. The park was named for William Terry, a local cattle rancher and civic booster.

The Athletics trained at Terry Park from nineteen twenty-five through nineteen thirty-six, twelve seasons, during which they won back to back World Series titles in nineteen twenty-nine and nineteen thirty, before losing the nineteen thirty-one series to the Cardinals. Fort Myers became, for six weeks each spring, a town where you could watch a dynasty take shape on a practice field.

After Mack moved the Athletics elsewhere, the Cleveland Indians trained here from nineteen forty through nineteen forty-two. The Pittsburgh Pirates followed in nineteen fifty-five and stayed through nineteen sixty-eight. The Kansas City Royals came after that. Four different franchises, four different eras. The ball field on the south side of Fort Myers witnessed nearly half a century of the game's history just in exhibition games.

Terry Park is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places and still hosts youth and amateur baseball. The grandstand has been there long enough to have hosted players who went on to be Hall of Famers, and long enough to have hosted the great-grandchildren of the people who watched them.

Fort Myers still hosts spring training. The Red Sox and the Twins hold their Grapefruit League games at modern facilities across town. But Terry Park is where it started, and it is still standing.