The Tigers Come to Town
Near Lakeland, Florida
The relationship between the Detroit Tigers and this city is the longest-running partnership between a major league baseball team and a spring training host in American history. It began in nineteen thirty-four, when the Tigers first came to Lakeland to train at Henley Field, a ballpark on North Florida Avenue named for a local pharmacist who sold tickets at his drugstore counters. That partnership has held through wars, floods, labor strikes, and every temptation to move that other Florida cities have offered over the decades.
Henley Field opened in nineteen twenty-three and hosted the Cleveland Indians for spring training before the Tigers arrived. The Tigers trained there from nineteen thirty-four through nineteen forty-two, paused during World War Two because wartime travel restrictions forced teams to train closer to their home cities, then returned to Henley in nineteen forty-six and stayed until nineteen sixty-five.
In nineteen sixty-six, the Tigers moved to the newly built Joker Marchant Stadium, named for Marcus Joker Marchant, the longtime city parks and recreation director. The stadium sat on the former site of the Lodwick School of Aeronautics, a World War Two flight training facility that had graduated more than six thousand American and twelve hundred British pilots. The stadium has been expanded and renovated several times, most recently in twenty seventeen, bringing its current capacity to eighty-five hundred seats.
Joker Marchant Stadium hosted its first game in nineteen sixty-six. The Tigers have been coming here every February ever since. In spring training circles, that kind of constancy is almost unheard of. Most teams chase new stadium deals every generation. Lakeland never lost its team, partly because the city kept investing in the facilities, and partly because the Tigers kept winning championships here, including pennant-winning rosters that tuned up on this field. In spring twenty twenty-six the Tigers marked their ninetieth spring training in Lakeland and their sixty-first at this stadium.
