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Arizona

San Francisco Giants: Arizona Spring Training Baseball

Program No. 7197RJ

Cheer on your San Francisco Giants as you head to Scottsdale Stadium to celebrate all things baseball. Attend four games and meet baseball insiders who share their love of the game.

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Baseball

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6 days

5 nights

10 meals

5B 0L 5D

Check-in, Program Registration, Orientation, Welcome Dinner

Scottsdale Old Town

Sportswriter, Spring Fever, Game 1, Baseball Historian

Scottsdale Old Town

Humm Baby Giants, Game 2

Scottsdale Old Town

Baseball Legacy Exhibit, Game 3, AZ D'Backs Organist.

Scottsdale Old Town

Broadcaster, Game 4

Scottsdale Old Town

Program Concludes, Independent Departures

Scottsdale Old Town

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At a Glance

Enjoy the intimate and casual atmosphere of spring training baseball as you cheer on your San Francisco Giants. Before the Giants hit a single home run into McCovey Cove, they prepare for the season at Scottsdale Stadium, their Arizona home since 1992. Study baseball in-depth as you meet baseball “lifers” from a variety of backgrounds in the game, whose insider experiences and storytelling talents will keep you on the edge of your seat. Scottsdale is buzzing with baseball come March and you will be right in the thick of it!

Activity Level

On Your Feet

Walk one-half mile; stairs at ballparks. Games attended are dependent on Cactus League schedule, which is finalized in December.

Best of all, you’ll…

Enjoy America’s pastime with great seats at four spring training games.
Meet a slew of baseball insiders including authors, reporters, broadcasters and more.
Rekindle your love of the game, watch the current team up close and get excited for the upcoming season!

General Notes

Transportation on this program is by full sized motorcoach which seats about 40 participants.

Featured Expert

All trip experts

Charlie Vascellaro

Author, traveler, historian, bibliophile, and baseball fan, when Charlie Vascellaro first discovered Major League Baseball in Arizona, his junior high school attendance suffered. Thirty years later, Vascellaro still takes a month-long hiatus from his life in Baltimore, MD to make an annual pilgrimage to Arizona for Cactus League spring training. Vascellaro is a constant contributor to many of the Cactus League teams’ spring training programs, appearing in national papers and authoring a limited edition historical volume commissioned by the United States Department of Commerce.

Please note: This expert may not be available for every date of this program.

Charlie Vascellaro View biography

Marty Lurie View biography

Nobody logs more hours on KNBR 680 during the San Francisco Giants season than Marty Lurie. A former attorney with a true love of the game, Marty decided years ago to put away the law books and focus on the scorebooks. Marty remembers everything when it comes to baseball. You can catch Marty Lurie broadcasting from the patio of the Public House restaurant and will be on the air for about three hours after the game taking phone calls from across the Giants’ fan base.

Bill Staples View biography

Bill Staples is a member of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) in Arizona with a passion for researching and telling the untold stories of the “international pastime.” His areas of expertise include Japanese American and Negro Leagues baseball history as a context for exploring the themes of civil rights, cross-cultural relations and globalization.

Robert Garratt View biography

Robert Garratt grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area an ardent fan of the San Francisco Giants. Upon his retirement from full-time teaching at a university, he began research on major league baseball’s move in 1958 to California. That initial research developed into a comprehensive history of the San Francisco Giants and the team’s relationship with the City and the greater Bay Area community.

Bobby Freeman View biography

Bobby Freeman had the honor of being named the official organist for the Arizona Diamondbacks in 1998. He has provided the music for the World Baseball Classic in 2006, numerous Division Championship games, and the 2011 MLB All-Star Game. Along with supporting the Diamondbacks during their home games, Bobby teams up with team mascot D. Baxter, appearing throughout Arizona at school and library assemblies and goodwill promotions. Bobby’s musical talents are truly enhanced by his engaging personality and ability to thoroughly entertain his audience.

Suggested Reading List (10 books)

Visit the Road Scholar Bookshop

You can find many of the books we recommend at the Road Scholar store on bookshop.org, a website that supports local bookstores.

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San Francisco Giants: Arizona Spring Training Baseball

Program Number: 7197

Scandal on the South Side: The 1919 Chicago White Sox

by Jacob Pomrenke

The Black Sox Scandal is a cold case, not a closed case. When Eliot Asinof wrote his classic history about the fixing of the 1919 World Series, Eight Men Out, he told a dramatic story of undereducated and underpaid Chicago White Sox ballplayers, disgruntled by their low pay and poor treatment by team management, who fell prey to the wiles of double-crossing big-city gamblers offering them bribes to lose the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. Shoeless Joe Jackson, Buck Weaver, Eddie Cicotte, and the other Black Sox players were all banned from organized baseball for life. But the real story is a lot more complex. We now have access to crucial information that changes what we thought we knew about “baseball’s darkest hour” — including rare film footage from that fateful fall classic, legal documents from the criminal and civil court proceedings, and accurate salary information for major-league players and teams. All of these new pieces to the Black Sox puzzle provide definitive answers to some old mysteries and raise other questions in their place.

Ball Four

by Jim Bouton

When first published in 1970, Ball Four stunned the sports world. The commissioner, executives, and players were shocked. Sportswriters called author Jim Bouton a traitor and "social leper." Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn tried to force him to declare the book untrue. Fans, however, loved the book. And serious critics called it an important social document. Today, Jim Bouton is still not invited to Oldtimer's Days at Yankee Stadium. But his landmark book is still considered a classic baseball related read.

Game Time: A Baseball Companion by Roger Angell,

by Roger Angell,

In Game Time, Roger Angell’s essays illuminate baseball’s heart and history in careful prose that New Yorker readers have grown to anticipate each spring. The collection spans the forty-plus years of Angell’s baseball writing career and includes many of his favorite pieces as well as never-before-published material.

Wait Till Next Year - A Memoir

by Doris Kearns Goodwin

When historian Goodwin was six years old, her father taught her how to keep score for "their" team, the Brooklyn Dodgers. While this activity forged a lifelong bond between father and daughter, her mother formed an equally strong relationship with her through the shared love of reading. Goodwin recounts some wonderful stories in this coming-of-age tale about both her family and an era when baseball truly was the national pastime that brought whole communities together.

The Boys of Summer

by Roger Kahn

"At a point in life when one is through with boyhood, but has not yet discovered how to be a man, it was my fortune to travel with the most marvelously appealing of teams." Sentimental because it holds such promise, and bittersweet because that promise is past, the first sentence of this masterpiece of sporting literature, first published in the early '70s, sets its tone. What follows only gets better, deeper, more sentimental, and more bittersweet. The team, of course, is the mid-20th-century Brooklyn Dodgers, the team of Robinson and Snyder and Hodges and Reese, a team of great triumph and historical import composed of men whose fragile lives were filled with dignity and pathos.

Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend

by James S Hirsch

This is the definitive Mays biography. Mays was a transcendent figure who received standing ovations in enemy stadiums and who, during the turbulent civil rights era, urged understanding and reconciliation. More than his records, his legacy is defined by the pure joy that he brought to fans and the loving memories that have been passed to future generations so they might know the magic and beauty of the game. With meticulous research and drawing on interviews with Mays himself as well as with close friends, family, and teammates, Hirsch presents a brilliant portrait of one of America’s most significant cultural icons.

Moneyball

by Michael Lewis

Billy Beane, the Oakland A’s general manager, is leading a revolution. Reinventing his team on a budget, he needs to outsmart the richer teams. He signs undervalued players whom the scouts consider flawed but who have a knack for getting on base, scoring runs, and winning games. Moneyball is a quest for the secret of success in baseball and a tale of the search for new baseball knowledge—insights that will give the little guy who is willing to discard old wisdom the edge over big money.

SATCHEL: The Life and Times of an American Legend by Larry Tye

by Larry Tye

He is that rare American icon who has never been captured in a biography worthy of him. Now, at last, here is the superbly researched, spellbindingly told story of athlete, showman, philosopher, and boundary breaker Leroy “Satchel” Paige. Tye shows Paige barnstorming across America and growing into the superstar hurler of the Negro Leagues, a marvel who set records so eye-popping they seemed like misprints, and spent as much money as he made. In unprecedented detail, Tye reveals how Paige, hurt and angry when Jackie Robinson beat him to the Majors, emerged at the age of forty-two to help propel the Cleveland Indians to the World Series. He threw his last pitch from a big-league mound at an improbable fifty-nine. (“Age is a case of mind over matter,” he said. “If you don’t mind, it don’t matter.”)

The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It

by Lawrence S. Ritter

The voices of the game's distant past continue to reverberate with a distinct freshness in Lawrence S. Ritter's The Glory of Their Times. An oral history of the game in the first two decades of the century, Glory sends out its impressive roster of players to tell their own stories, and what stories they tell. A delight from cover to cover, Glory is the next best thing to having been there in the days when the ball may have been dead, but the personalities were anything but.

The Brothers K

by David James Duncan

While this is not a pure "baseball book", baseball provides the central metaphor for this huge hypnotic novel. It is a stunning work: a complex tapestry of family tensions, baseball, politics and religion, by turns hilariously funny and agonizingly sad. The novel is narrated by Kincaid Chance, the youngest son in a family of six, the children of Hugh Chance, a discouraged minor-league ballplayer whose once-promising career was curtained by an industrial accident, and his wife Laura, an increasingly fanatical Seventh-Day Adventist. The plot traces the working-out of the family's fate from the beginning of the Eisenhower years through the traumas of Vietnam.

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San Francisco Giants: Arizona Spring Training Baseball

Enroll with Confidence

Protecting the Environment

At a Glance

Best of all, you’ll…

General Notes

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