No tears falling as Tribe bids farewell to Florida

This spring, SI.com senior writer John Donovan is touring the Grapefruit and Cactus leagues to cover baseball's biggest newsmakers. Today he reports from Indians camp in Winter Haven, Fla. Next stop: Jupiter, Fla.

Winter Haven's tradition as a spring training home is coming to an end. Chuck Solomon

WINTER HAVEN, Fla. -- For the better part of 16 years, Mark Shapiro has been making an annual trek to this Central Florida snowbird getaway for spring training. The Indians' longtime baseball operations man, now the team's general manager, knows this place inside and out. He grew up in baseball here. And now he, and the Indians, are moving on.

Chain of Lakes Park, the team's home in Winter Haven, is in a lot of ways the complete opposite of Dodgertown, that venerable spring training institution about 95 miles east of here in Vero Beach. One is beloved, the other bedraggled. Yet both the Indians and the Dodgers will be fleeing their Florida camps for bigger, better sites in Arizona next spring.

It's a strange contrast. Where the demise of Dodgertown and its quaint and historic vibe has been met with tears and nostalgia, the only sounds emanating from Winter Haven this spring are some yawns and a few muffled cheers.

This isn't, after all, Indianstown. Never has been. Never will be.

Welcome to Winter Haven

If there's one defining characteristic of the Indians' spring training home here, it's the Florida-kitschy orange dome that looms over the left field wall at the Chain of Lakes complex. (It's called, not at all cleverly, the Orange Dome.) For a period of about three years in the late '90s, the dome was painted white with red laces, making it look like a huge, half-plugged-in-the-mud baseball. Once it started looking like an old batting practice ball, a little rough around the edges, it was restored to its original orange, which it's been ever since. It had been, among other things, the home to the Florida Citrus Festival until that gala folded late last month.

The dome, though, isn't the only aesthetically questionable part of the complex. Rising over the center-field wall is an addition to the stadium skyline -- the corner of a new Holiday Inn. Low-lying condos over the right-field wall complete the ringed-in effect. Outside of the main stadium, the rest of the complex is bland and without any discernible style. And the drive into Winter Haven from Orlando or Tampa -- numbingly boring, through empty parcels of land, a strip-center here, a Denny's there -- isn't exactly a Chamber of Commerce scenic route, either.

It's not all tackiness in Winter Haven. The complex sits on Lake Lulu, providing a pretty backdrop while strolling around the other fields. It's quieter than a lot of sites stuck in the middle of bigger cities or alongside highways. There are plenty of places for fans to grab autographs. On the back fields, it's easy to get nose-to-chain link with the players.

Inside the main stadium, ignoring the big orange over the left field wall, there is a good, old-time Florida spring training feel. The stadium's cinder block walls are painted red and blue, and the covered grandstand is complete with view-obstructing poles. The outfield walls are peppered with billboards for both national companies (Terminix, McDonald's) and local merchants (Pasquale's Pizzeria, Field Equipment Co. Inc.). On any given day during spring training, fans can wander down into the left-field pavilion and get an autograph from Hall of Famer Bob Feller.

"I do understand the charms of it," Shapiro insists.

But the negatives of the place -- beyond the kitsch -- are just too great. Many of the fields are not level. The drainage on them is poor. The clubhouse, weight rooms and other amenities for the players are sub-standard. The concession areas and public facilities are not as good as they are in the newer parks.

Plus -- and this is a big negative, maybe the biggest -- the finances just don't work. For anyone.

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