MLB spring training, as told by team creatives and marketers

As if 162 regular-season MLB games per team weren’t enough, every February, players head to Florida and Arizona for two months of spring training before the official start of the season.

They’re not the only ones packing their bags. Some teams bring along their content, creative, and social media crews to post from spring training and stockpile content for the rest of the season, squeezing in shoots around game and practice schedules.

“It’s one of my favorite times of the year,” Tyler Thompson, director of game entertainment and experiential marketing at the Seattle Mariners, told Marketing Brew. “The mark of the start of baseball for me, even more than opening day, is getting to go down to spring training, hearing the bat and the mitt, and just starting to ramp up to hopefully what’s going to be a great season.”

Sprint, not a marathon

Most of the Mariners production team spends around two weeks in Arizona for spring training, and for as long as the team is there, there’s at least a photographer, a videographer, and the team’s senior director of digital marketing and social media, Tim Walsh.

Planning starts as early as the summer, Ben Mertens, VP of creative and content services, said, and prep kicks into higher gear once the season ends, Thompson said. At that point, staffers start discussing what kind of content they want to film and scheduling shoots.

Once they touch down for spring training, it’s off to the races—or should we say bases?

“It’s an all-out sprint, kind of a hurricane,” Thompson said. “We come in, we try to get everything that we need for the season across all of our various sets, and leave no trace, because we know that our club is preparing for baseball.”

The content group for the Baltimore Orioles, who have spring training in Florida, also spends about two weeks “getting as much as we can as quickly as we can,” Tony Price, director of video creative, said.

There are other benefits beyond storing up social content for the season. “We leave right in the harshest point of Baltimore winter,” Price said. “We come back, and it’s the fake spring everybody’s always talking about.”

Gloves to green screens

Just because it’s the offseason doesn’t mean the posting stops, and spring training is no exception. Since spring training kicked off, the New York Yankees have posted question-of-the-day videos, the Boston Red Sox “let the outfield cover their own workouts,” and some Los Angeles Dodgers players got in a prank war.

The Orioles have used training to add to “The Chill,” a personality-based content series featuring players, and share other off-field content, like a pick-up line video for Valentine’s Day. The Mariners, meanwhile, spoofed the pitch comm device that catchers use to communicate with pitchers, mic’d up pitcher Bryce Miller, and shared a video of the content team pranking pitchers Tayler Saucedo and Trent Thornton.

Not all of the content captured at spring training gets posted immediately. The Mariners content team tries to get shots for upcoming theme nights, Thompson said. Walsh said they also focus on shooting player personality content, which the team has been using in recent years to connect with younger fans.

“The nuanced part of spring training is you’re trying to capture things that you need for eight months, while also trying to take advantage of what’s happening right in front of you,” Price said.

Beyond planning out posts, logistics can be challenging, Mertens said: The Mariners, for example, had 10 different sets for shooting content at spring training this year, he said. The team also coordinates with external partners, like a lie-detector company that hooked players up to a polygraph machine for some yet-to-be-shared content, Thompson added.

Team dinner

Then there’s the fact that the players have, well, training. Some athletes get to set as early as 6am, while others report after practice or in the evening, Thompson said. The content team arrives at the complex around 6am, and Walsh said they sometimes shuttle back and forth between set and field along with the players.

“We want to showcase and capture their fun personality, but we also want to show who they are on the field,” Walsh said. “Whether it’s capturing guys and putting together a quick little sizzle video from the day, or a one-off slow-mo clip of a guy on the mound…or strapping a GoPro to a catcher, that’s where we’ll do all those things.”

The days are long, but they’re also a bonding experience for the social teams. Price said Orioles staffers tend to eat “lots of tacos” during group meals when they’re down in Florida, and Thompson said some of the Mariners crew even live together for those weeks.

“It’s not the same up here,” he said. Spring break can’t last forever, but at least there’s opening day to look forward to.