Spring Fling: The Images Missed Without Spring Training

Full Frame is Sports Illustrated’s exclusive newsletter for subscribers. Coming to your inbox weekly, it highlights the stories and personalities behind some of SI’s photography.

To get the best of SI in your inbox every weekday, sign up here. To see even more from SI’s photographers, follow @sifullframe on Instagram. If you missed our story on the frigid conditions in Beijing, you can find it here.

A version of this piece appears in the March 2022 issue of Sports Illustrated.

The worst part of a labor stoppage in baseball, to some fans, isn’t the prospect of seeing Opening Day pushed back or having to read story after story about millionaires arguing with billionaires. Rather, it’s the potential loss of spring training

Walter Iooss Jr. first went to the Grapefruit League in the 1960s. Phillies slugger Richie Allen spotted the young photographer and his friend and decided they looked cool enough to ask them to hang out, beginning a decades-long friendship. Iooss also did some of his best work in Florida and Arizona, where the settings are distinctive and the vibes laidback. “This was the complete, total opposite of Yankee Stadium, where everything is restricted,” he says, reflecting on his first spring trip. “Everything was open. You could talk to the players, no one really cared where you stood. It was a happy experience.”

Another benefit: the natural light during morning workouts and late-afternoon drills. “Spring training was about the light, the backgrounds, the signs, the walls,” says Iooss, who took this picture of Yankees starter Sam McDowell in Bradenton, Fla., in 1974.

“Backgrounds to me are almost the most important part of a picture.”