Welcome to the jewel of the Grapefruit League

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 Jupiter, Fla. Next stop: St. Petersburg, Fla.

The best spring-training site in Florida is in Jupiter, home of Roger Dean Stadium. Doug Benc/Getty Images

JUPITER, Fla. -- No two spring training sites are both closer together and farther apart than Fort Lauderdale, the spring home of the Orioles, and Jupiter, where the Cardinals and Marlins do their thing. Fort Lauderdale, former home of the Yankees, is the unquestioned pit of spring training, a place with a dilapidated stadium that befits an organization that has fallen on hard times.

Jupiter, 58 miles north on I-95, is the jewel of this state's spring training, a site that combines the best of old-time Florida with the best of the new. With clean and fan-friendly Roger Dean Stadium as its centerpiece, this South Florida hot spot has just about everything that anyone could ask for in a spring-training experience.

Mostly, of course, it's not Fort Lauderdale.

Welcome to Jupiter

Jupiter is not for everybody. It is, in a kind of Floridian Disney tradition, a little too perfect, a little too antiseptic. The streets of the planned mixed-use development of Abacoa are clean and inviting. The traffic is controlled. There's a well-defined town center. There are green spaces and plenty of parking and small shops and one-of-a-kind restaurants within easy walking distance and all of those things that small communities everywhere say they want but just can't manage to pull off. It's almost scarily nice. The Fenway area, this is not.

What it may lack in non-manufactured character, though -- Roger Dean Stadium is only in its 11th season, after all, making it 36 years Fort Lauderdale Stadium's junior -- Jupiter makes up for in what it has to offer. Jupiter is easy to get to, just a couple minutes off of the interstate. It is easy to park around the stadium. It's easy to find a bite to eat, before or after the game.

Roger Dean Stadium is nicely laid out, with a party area and a small grass berm down the right-field line. It seats 7,000, which isn't exactly the intimate setting of Dodgertown's Holman Stadium. But it's not corporate 11,000-seat Legends Field, Tampa's home to the Yankees, either. And it sure doesn't have Tampa's traffic.

Fans can nudge close for an autograph in Jupiter -- again, maybe not as close as in Dodgertown, but pretty darn close. Players can get their work done and get out. The two teams have plenty of space for both the big-league and the minor-league sides -- the Marlins in a building with fields over the left-field wall of the stadium, the Cards with the same layout over the right-field fence. Everybody's happy in Jupiter.

Maybe it is too Disney-like.

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