“Grapefruit League” | The Wacky Story Behind Florida’s Spring Training League
From the Fountain of Youth to the Pirate Chief Gasparilla, you gotta hand it to Florida for its colorful backstories.
It all started with Al Lang, who moved from Pittsburgh to St Petersburg in 1910. An avid baseball fan, he relentlessly promoted the area as a site for major league spring training. Snubbed by several teams, he was finally successful in luring the Chicago Cubs to move their spring training from New Orleans to St Pete.
You have to wonder how ol’ Al took it when the Cubbies stopped off in Tampa on the way to St Pete. And stayed. Fortunately, a year later, the St Louis Browns agreed to set up shop in St Pete. As more and more teams started spending spring break in the Sunshine State, an informal league was born.
Enter badass aviator Ruth Oliver.
In the winter of 1915, Ruth was performing aerobatics over Daytona Beach. Seeing her skill, the owner of a nearby golf course had a crazy idea: He would hire her to drop golf balls from her plane as a publicity stunt.
When Brooklyn Dodgers manager Wilbert Robinson arrived in Daytona for spring training, he got wind of Law’s exploits and thought having her drop a baseball from her plane into his waiting mitt would be great advertising for the team.
On March 13, 1915, Law took off with a baseball on board. What happened next is a matter of dispute. Some say it was a simple mistake. Others say she’d actually forgotten the baseball and improvised with a piece of fruit conveniently at hand. Still others say it was an intentional prank. However it came to pass, Ruth Oliver dropped a grapefruit from her plane that day.
Released from a height of 525 feet, the “baseball” hit Robinson in the chest, exploding on impact. For several long seconds, the stunned manager thought the pulp and juice covering his body was his own blood, believing his chest had exploded from the force of the falling baseball. He ran around the field yelling “I’m dying! I’m dying!” while the rest of the team, realizing what had happened, laughed hilariously.
From that day forward, the teams gathered in Florida for spring baseball would be known as… the Grapefruit League.
