Times, and spring training, have certainly changed.
        Today, the Tiger players have their pick of fancy restaurants every night, drive expensive cars to and from Marchant Stadium and reside in nice new condos and homes, some as far away as Orlando.
        But Al Kaline remembers his first spring training in Lakeland, back in 1954. Nearly everybody on the team stayed in the “New Florida Hotel,” which was then on the edge of downtown. And even in those days, the nondescript high-rise was anything but new.
        The only TV set in the building was a little black-and-white set on a table in the small lobby. Each night, the players would argue with little ol’ gray-haired ladies over which of the three snowy channels to watch.
        “There was no air-conditioning,” recalled Kaline, then a kid of 19. “There was nothing to do except sit on the chairs out on the front porch and rock.”
        Some of the veteran Tigers with young families rented efficiencies or little cottages outside of town, along the two-lane road to Tampa.
        Most of those places were so seedy the players’ wives had to fumigate them with bug spray from top to bottom each spring  before they would allow their  kids to set foot inside.
        Lakeland and Polk County were “dry” in those days. Which meant, if the manager or any of the Tigers who were of age wanted a beer after a long, hot day on the practice field, they had to drive to a country saloon just across the county line _ or, if they were lucky, wangle an invitation to the local Elks Club, where there was usually an illegal card game going on in the basement.
        There were only two decent restaurants in town -- a rustic steakhouse, which was beyond many of the younger Tigers’ meager budgets more than once a month, and a cafeteria that catered to retirees.
        The first year Willie Horton came to spring training he rode the Greyhound bus down from Detroit.
        Lakeland was still segregated in those days and Horton couldn’t find a taxi that would take him to Tigertown. So Willie picked up his bags and walked to the ballpark, two miles away.
        In later years, Horton would sometimes drive from Detroit to Lakeland. Many players did that to save money in those days. In the mid-70s, Horton car-pooled one year with Ron LeFlore and Ben Oglivie.
        “Ronnie would never help out with the driving and whenever we stopped for food or to get gas he would pretend like he was asleep, snoring in the backseat, so that he didn’t have to pay, ” Horton recalled.
        “Then he’d wake up and say, ‘I’m hungry. What have we got to eat?’
        “Oglivie got tired of that so he pulled the car off the road and challenged LeFlore to a fight. Benji was into that kung-fu stuff and pretty soon he had Ronnie flat on his face in the gravel alongside the road.
        “A state trooper was driving by, going in the opposite direction on the other side of the highway, but when he saw us out of the car he turned around and came back,” Horton continued.
        “He walked up to our car and said, ‘What’s going on here?’
        “I said, ‘We’re just trying to get to spring training.’
        “He looked at us and he laughed and he said, ‘Well, have a good spring, boys’ ”