Note: This article was originally published in the Toronto Star on February 28, 1992 and is part of a new ‘Throwback Thursday’ sports series.

DUNEDIN—It is that time again and baseball beckons.

The sights, the sounds, the vernal hopes of spring training are upon the land: cowhide on ash, a fist in a glove, the nonsensical huzzah of diamond chatter.

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There is a splendor in the grass and a buffeting breeze in the palms.

The baseball bivouacs finally opened here this week, chasing away the last vestiges of winter. ‘Tis the season and it is spring.

The men who will be boys, forever young or so they aim to prove, have returned to their mother ships. Pitchers and catchers reported on Monday, position players yesterday. Veterans and scrubeenies, new faces and old bodies.

And the oldest body of them all belongs to the newest Toronto Blue Jay of them all — Dave Winfield.

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He is 40 years young — a life-long child of the game with all the joy and glee of a baseball sprout, albeit one who stands 6 foot 6 and weighs 220 pounds.

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Those are broad shoulders stretching that Toronto jersey. And if there was one message in his mannerisms here yesterday, it was this: Lean on me.

Winfield has waited a long time to wear this uniform. Toronto has waited a long time to see him in it. And it is a perfect fit.

They cheered him lustily yesterday, all those welcoming fans who lined the circumference of the Cecil P. Englebert baseball complex here. And he cheered them right back.

“It’s been a pretty good welcome so far and I think it will be the same when I get to Toronto, “ a delighted Winfield observed.

“I don’t know. The Toronto fans seemed to take to me pretty well, even when I was with the New York Yankees or the California Angels. Part of it, I guess, is just playing well and playing with a smile.”

There are a lot of smiles down here.

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It is an egalitarian time — a level playing field for World Series champions and bottom-feeding bums. There are no front-runners at spring training and no sad songs.

For the Toronto Blue Jays, there are no misbegotten yesterdays, either. The inglorious five-game foldup in the American League playoffs is a receding memory. Spring training is about optimism and fresh starts and endless possibilities.

Toronto Blue Jays 1992 World Series champs Joe Carter, left, and Dave Winfield savour the moment on Oct. 24, 1992 in Atlanta. (COLIN MCCONNELL / Toronto Star)

It is also something of a con; a curio that is resurrected every year mostly because this most tradition-besotted of sports is still in love with its ancient rhythms and eccentricities.

Six weeks of preparation under a Florida or Arizona sun is an orgy of self-indulgence. There was a time perhaps, when the Earth was flat and idle athletes got fat, that this southern sojourn was considered a necessity. In those days, spring training was a “boiling out” exercise, as in boiling out the booze.

Or maybe we should just blame the phenomenon on Ponce de Leon, the Spanish explorer who discovered the Florida peninsula in 1513 when he was looking for the fountain of youth. Most of these baseball conquistadors are still looking.

Archivists in Cooperstown, N.Y., cite the Chicago White Stockings, lineal ancestors of the Chicago Cubs, as the first club to take the temperate waters in 1870 in New Orleans, which seems a decidedly odd choice for swearing off debauchery.

Others squads barnstormed in the sultry south, in Georgia and South Carolina. But the first to actually strike camp in Florida, in 1888, were the Washington Senators. The state has never been the same since.

The Jays have been doing the Dunedin thing here for 16 years now. Which is fortunate for Dunedin since there was nothing to recommend this drowsy retirement burg until baseball came to town.

By the end of next week, the grapefruit games will commence. But for now spring training is about getting reacquainted with teammates and recalcitrant muscles.

There’s pitcher David Wells, proud new father, holding forth on the proper way to burp a baby. And manager Cito Gaston lifting his shirt to show off the surgical scar on his back. And Dave Stieb, assuring one and all that his herniated disc problem is coming along nicely, even though he looks fragile when he tries to light toss a few.

And, yes, it is Winfield loping across the outfield with that long-legged gait, his baseball cap spun around backward. Or introducing himself to the young ‘uns, just as if they had never heard of him before.

But mostly spring training is about the dastardly conditioning exercises that fitness guru Rick Knox and the coaching despots have devised for their grumbling recruits: push-ups, floor thrusts, oblique twists, arm circles, lunges, chest passes, overhead throws, lateral pickups, forearm stretches, abdominal curls, knee lifts, leg crunches. On and on.

Every morning the players emerge from their clubhouse, their cleats crunching on the pavement of the courtyard. And every morning they are given a round of applause by the scores of fans who stand like hopeful sentinels behind the security-guarded gates. “Hey Dave, how’s the back?” Or, “Kellykellykellykelly!” Or, “Que pasa, Robbie?”

Each day, the players line up along the chain link fence — hard by a mini-swamp that is allegedly inhabited by ‘gators — and are put through their gruelling, comical contortions. By the end of it, they are on their knees.

It has rained much of this first week. Rained hard.

Inside that refuge, the pitchers have started to throw hard, too, under the watchful gaze of bullpen coach John Sullivan, a wizened cherub with a perennial wad of chewing tobacco bulging his cheek.

David Weathers may be throwing strongest of all in these early days. His pitches whiz and crack like tiny explosions when they find the catcher’s mitt.

Meanwhile, newly appointed batting instructor Larry Hisle has assembled a group of Blue Jay greenhorns, sitting all in a row along a back wall bench. Hisle — former Philly, former Twin, former Brewer — puts his hands on hips and offers launches into a hitting tutorial. The baby Jays listen respectfully.

For Gaston, this embryonic baseball campaign is a time to rejoice — if only because he is no longer in the physical agony that accompanied every moment of the ‘91 campaign.

“Sometimes I look back and I wonder how I ever made it through the season, “ he says, assuming the familiar managerial stance — hands jammed down the front of his pants. “That was the kind of pain I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Hopefully, I don’t even have a worst enemy.”

There was talk early last fall that maybe Gaston would not be back as the Blue Jay skipper because of the team’s woeful playoff performance. But he was signed again, quickly, to another one year contract.

“Yeah, I heard some people were giving me no more than a 50-50 chance of returning. I didn’t like that. But take a look at (Pittsburgh manager) Jim Leyland. We had just about the same year and they gave him a contract for five years.”

It obviously rankles. But the Jays have always insisted on one-year terms for their managers.

But this is a relaxed and genial Gaston at spring training. Typically low-keyed. Not getting in any of players’ faces yet. Just watching, always watching.

“I’ve always enjoyed spring training. ‘Course, I used it enjoy it a lot more when I was a player and didn’t have to worry about going to all these damn meetings. Then you could get in a little golf, a little fishing.”

Still, he remembers the trepidation athletes feel coming into camp, especially the ones at either end of the performance spectrum — the kids trying to break in, the veterans trying to hang on.

But Gaston knows that spring training numbers don’t necessarily amount to a hill of beans in baseball. And Florida baseball novas can disappear into a black hole of incompetence once the real season rolls around.

“I remember my first spring training in San Diego. I was so dumb back then. But I had a heck of a spring training. Hit something like .370. Then, once the season started, I couldn’t hit the side of a barn.

“One time later in the season, we were on a plane, flying over the place that we had spring-trained. And this guy says to me, ‘Hey Cito, go on down there and get your stroke back from where you left it.’ “

He giggles.

It is a lovely sound.

More from Throwback Thursday at the Star:

Trade rumours swirl after Rick Vaive sleeps through practice, loses captaincy

Toronto’s shy superstar Vince Carter enjoys limelight on court, but lies low off it