Spring training isn't what it used to be. Baseball's annual warm-up is wrapping up a major consolidation. Next year, half of all teams will get ready for the season within 50 miles of each other around Phoenix. That change, and others, have some old-timers remembering how it used to be…

Billy DeLury is having a hard time getting used to the place. The skinny, bespectacled 76-year-old drives around in a golf cart. And he compares the luxury here with the former military barracks in Vero Beach, Fla., where the Dodgers slept in 1951, when he joined the team as a 17-year-old office boy…

"Forty years ago, all there was was a whirlpool, and that was it," DeLury says. "A whirlpool and a bottle of alcohol and some liniment, and that was it. But you walk into a training room today it looks like some Mayo Clinic ... with all the machines they got in there."

WBUR.org (NPR – All Things Considered) by Ted Robbins, 3/30/2010

Tags: baseball, Mayo Clinic, Uncategorized