A love letter to springtrainingconnection.com

The best spring training planning tool is free and easy to use

springtrainingconnection.com

I just got back from my second annual trip to spring training in Arizona. I had a blast in sunny Tempe, catching four Angels games and even getting a wave from Ron Washington as he zipped by me on a golf cart in the parking lot behind the Tempe Diablo Stadium.

While I usually spend a lot of time scrolling through Google and Reddit researching travel plans, in making my plans for this trip and my trip last year, I pretty much stuck to one incredibly valuable free resource – the no-frills website springtrainingconnection.com.

Spring Training Connection is an old school website with no ads (that I could see), an easily navigable design, and a whole lot of straightforward information. Not only are there individual pages for each spring training stadium, the website compiles nearby hotels, restaurants, and game schedules, as well as detailed information on obscured view seats, shady spots, food options in the park, and where to best nab autographs around each stadium.

The one small con of the site is that there’s no place to send in info about recent changes (the one email address listed bounced back). On this trip, I noted that Tempe Diablo Stadium has raised its parking prices from $5 to $10, and the site still lists the price at $5. But beyond that one change, all the other information I referred to was accurate, and from what I can tell, the site is very much up to date.

If you’re planning on making it out to spring training for the last few games or are planning on making a big trip next year, Spring Training Connection wont steer you wrong. It’s really incredible to see someone (or someones - I couldn’t track down who runs the site) put so much work into a resource like this.

I was really delighted to come across this website, and I’m actually a little surprised that there isn’t a similar resource for MLB stadiums. But then again, when you think about the amount of work and research that goes into a project like this, it makes more sense why we see so few websites along these lines. In that way, Spring Training Connection feels like a throwback to an earlier age of the internet, when the web was full of great, simple websites with regular people behind the screens.