One of the greatest things about annual traditions is how eagerly they are anticipated by those who celebrate them. Each November, there emerges a great debate about how early Christmas music or decorations should be enjoyed. For American sports fans, the same is true about the coming of baseball. As the holidays wrap up and the new year begins, many of us who grew up loving the game begin the countdown to spring training.

There is something very special about the way the calendar overlaps with baseball season. The World Series takes place in late October, leaving the holiday season open for rest and retooling. Pitchers and catchers report to their club’s facilities in Arizona or Florida by the second week of February. Then the march toward the regular season begins.

Baseball is a game of faces and places. Spring training offers fans a unique opportunity to escape the brutal cold of the winter and to track their teams up close. A majority of the major league franchises are located in cold weather states, making Arizona and Florida natural locations, and destinations, for preparing for the upcoming season..

Professional baseball franchises began their winter migration south as early as the 1880s to cities like New Orleans, Hot Springs, and Jacksonville. By 1914, the Chicago Cubs (Tampa), St. Louis Browns (St. Petersburg), St. Louis Cardinals (St. Augustine) and Philadelphia Athletics (Jacksonville) formed the foundations of the Grapefruit League. In the decades to come, teams would sprinkle throughout the peninsula in cities like Brandenton, Cocoa, Clearwater, Daytona, Davenport, Dunedin, Fort Myers, Fort Lauderdale, Jupiter, Lakeland, Leesburg, Miami, Ocala, Orlando, Pompano, Port St. Lucie, Sanford, Sarasota, Vero, West Palm, Winter Garden, and Winter Haven.

Many of these relationships between MLB franchises and Florida cities have lasted for decades. The Brooklyn turned Los Angeles Dodgers famously held camp in Vero Beach from 1948 to 2008. The Philadelphia Phillies have held spring training in Clearwater since 1947, making them the second longest club-city relationship in all of baseball. Clearwater is second only to Lakeland, which has hosted the Detroit Tigers since 1934. Both the Tigers and Phillies have effectively built multi-generational bridges between Detroit-Lakeland and Philadelphia-Clearwater.

Today’s Grapefruit League is mostly clustered in cities along the Gulf Coast from Dunedin to Fort Myers and in South Florida from Port St. Lucie to West Palm Beach. Lakeland remains the only location left in Florida’s central interior. The proximity of these cities allows big leaguers to travel like their minor league counterparts in buses from town to town.

In 1947, Cleveland Indians owner Bill Veeck and New York Giants owner Horace Stoneham collaborated to leave their spring training homes in Florida for a new venture in the Arizona desert. In a quest for a different climate and new opportunities, the Cactus League was born. As baseball moved west, spring training slowly began to follow. The Chicago Cubs soon moved to Mesa. By 1980 there were eight MLB franchises hosting spring training in Arizona.

The Grand Canyon State became a natural fit for franchises west of the Mississippi. Here the Oakland Athletics, San Diego Padres, Seattle Mariners, Milwaukee Brewers and Chicago White Sox would settle. The success of the Cactus League would eventually lead to local economic incentives designed to lure in teams from Florida. The Kansas City Royals (in 2002), along with the Cincinnati Reds and Los Angeles Dodgers (both in 2008) would head west. The Cleveland Guardians (formerly Indians) would bounce between states and finally settled back in Arizona in 2008. The Cactus League would also add 1990s expansion teams, to include the Arizona Diamondbacks and Colorado Rockies.

Today’s Grapefruit and Cactus Leagues split professional franchises evenly between Florida and Arizona. They play in state-of-the-art facilities and keep full-time professional staff employed locally. Most of them also serve as minor league ballparks and allow the franchises to continuously train and rehabilitate players throughout the calendar year.

This level of investment may be a far cry from old-fashioned winter retreats, but the general concept remains the same. For fans, attending a spring training game has a very mystical quality to it. While it may only be an exhibition, it truly personalizes the game for fans, allowing them to participate in ways that would be impossible during the regular season. It offers players an opportunity to earn their way into spots on the big-league roster and for writers, it a thousand stories for speculating about the season ahead. For ordinary fans, it’s arguably the only preseason sport worthy of personal investment, offering them a chance to meet and greet players, get autographs, and view big personalities in a much smaller venue.

Over the next six weeks, teams will be assembled, and fans will flock from cities across the land to get a glimpse of hope for the season ahead. The joys of Spring will soon transform into the grind of Summer, when, for the best among these, hopes will turn to Fall. Baseball, just as life, is a game of seasons. For well over a century, spring training in baseball has been a unique aspect of American cultural life in which hope springs eternal. Spring training, in this sense, is one of those few things in America that seems almost permanent.