For as long as I can remember, I have loved sports. More accurately, I love watching sports. While I can do things like hit or throw a baseball in a not-totally-embarrassing manner, and make a basket in a game of Horse, my sporting skills are…less than spectacular. Actually, I should rephrase that as well (seriously, I should just type these things the first time, and save everyone the extraneous commentary). Unless it’s a sport you can play while drinking a beer, my sporting skills are…less than spectacular.

I mean, come on. I grew up in Wisconsin. Obviously I can do things like bowl at a level that makes others who didn’t have an upbringing around dairy cows envious. When I go bowling and break out the bowling ball (she even has a name! Deb!), it tends to throw off the casual bowlers I have met since leaving Wisconsin. Who knew? The heels and dresses throw people off of the “bowler” image.

Anyway, before I start getting into a bowling discussion, back to the point. One of the joys of this year is being able to (hopefully) knock a few of my sports bucket list items off. The main one of those is the baseball fan’s ultimate sports bucket list item: visit all the Major League ballparks. I am already about halfway there, and thankfully, the majority of the parks I am missing are along the East Coast, so hopefully I can get many of them at the beginning of this next season (before some of the teams break away and getting tickets becomes a pricier proposition).

However, in the meantime, as baseball season is still at a (somewhat) distant date, I am doing something that every sports fan should have on his or her bucket list: visiting spring training.

It’s not my first trip around the spring training block – that was a very memorable trip to A’s camp, sometime around my 13th birthday. The MTV Sports crew was there (I’m showing my age here, as I have no idea when that went off the air), my mom and Dan Cortes engaged in some witty repartee, and I got Tawny Kitaen’s autograph before she became known for hitting her baseball player husband, Chuck Finley, with her heels (my personally preferred mode of attack). Actually, I’m pretty sure she was still married to David Coverdale, of Whitesnake fame, at the time.

Like I said, not my first trip to spring training.

That said, all trips to spring training are fun, though usually not because you meet someone who later was charged with domestic violence because of her shoes. Usually, just being somewhere warm, with the sun shining as everyone back home gets snowed on is enough to make you value your time away and at spring training, watching players who you may never see again when they don’t make the club, and getting to be up close to the players who you only see from a distance once the season begins.

If you are a baseball fan, I can’t recommend spring training enough – and if you aren’t, there is little better than baseball to use as an excuse to drink beer all afternoon in the sun (so yes, become a baseball fan, if only to go to spring training. Though really, drinking beer in the sun during the summer and under the night lights also has a lot of appeal. Of course, you do both of these things with a ticket that costs more than $8, so it’s not quite the same).

Baseball TimeBrats and beer, sunny skies, temperature in the 70s. Is this heaven? No. It’s spring training.