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PEORIA, Ariz. — The music was one of the first things A.J. Preller noticed.
It was the summer of 2015, and the San Diego Padres general manager was in training camp with Pete Carroll’s Seattle Seahawks. Hired the previous August, Preller had traveled to the Pacific Northwest seeking ideas he could bring back to a historically overlooked baseball club.
The Seahawks, Preller soon learned, operated with a constant soundtrack — on the practice field, in the locker room, in spaces that at other facilities might exist in silence. There were even DJs in team meetings.
“The music was in your face,” Preller said. “It was loud, it was fun, it was fast.”
A famously energetic football coach provided a simple explanation. Music, Carroll told Preller, makes you feel good. You listen to it in the car, in the gym, in the shower. Why should professional sports be any different? But Carroll’s reasoning went beyond mood.
“The more accustomed we get to things going on all around us when we need to focus is really the idea,” Carroll said in 2015, soon after he inspired Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr to pump music in NBA practice gyms. “Let’s have our ability to hold on to the focus that allows us to perform like we’re capable, regardless of what the setting is.”
Mark Prior, then the Padres’ minor-league pitching coordinator, made the trip with Preller. The former USC star shared a connection with Carroll and remembered backfields being “quiet” when he was coming up as a pitcher with the Chicago Cubs. “We just thought the atmosphere was energetic,” said Prior, now the Los Angeles Dodgers’ pitching coach. “A lot of times, minor-league practices can get mundane.”
That fall at the Peoria Sports Complex in Arizona, Preller turned on the music.
A decade later, it is almost everywhere in spring training. Walk through any major-league site in Arizona or Florida, and you will hear it. Reggaeton pulsating across backfields. Hip-hop blaring from the weight room.
What was once largely confined to stadiums during batting practice has become a pervasive fixture. Clubs have installed permanent sound systems and dedicated speakers on backstop fencing.
The change has altered the vibe of spring training — and also underscored one of Carroll’s central points: There are few things more important than energy in the workplace.
“Music gives you energy, gives you an attitude of a smile on your face,” Padres manager Craig Stammen said. “Why not use it to make your day a little bit better?”
The exact origin of baseball’s music era remains murky. Like most simple innovations, it’s hard to believe no one thought of it earlier. Yet the Padres’ trip to Renton, Wash., stands as a potential catalyst.
“If Pete Carroll did it, it’s just another one of the amazing things that Pete Carroll has given the world of sports,” said Seattle Mariners president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto, whose team shares a spring complex with the Padres.
An athlete’s relationship to music might seem like a matter of preference, a way to set the tone. Research has shown that it can also produce a tangible effect. Padres pitcher Matt Waldron believes music “amps you up without knowing it.” A 2021 review in the Journal of Functional Morphology and Kinesiology found that listening to music may positively impact the perceived effort of physical exertion and “increase motivation and effort, leading to improved performance outcomes.”
In a communal setting, such an influence becomes more noticeable. After experiencing the vibe of the Seahawks, Preller returned convinced that Peoria backfields required an audible. That September, he enlisted Padres facility manager Todd Stephenson to arrange a makeshift outdoor setup for the Arizona Instructional League, an annual gathering of young minor-league players. On came the music.
The next morning, they tried turning it off.
“It was dead,” Preller said. “It was kind of quiet.”
That was all they needed to know. By the next spring training, in 2016, the Padres were on their way to installing separate sound systems for their main practice fields, batting cage, weight room and other portions of the building. The operation, Stephenson said, took a couple of years to perfect. Yet it did not take long for the Mariners, listening from across the complex, to begin ordering speakers of their own.
Now Stephenson can control everything with a few taps on an iPad in his office. He is almost perpetually surrounded by music. At times, during the summer lull that precedes the Arizona Complex League, he’ll turn it off.
“Some days, it’s a good break,” Stephenson said. “And some days, when it’s 120 degrees and you see our Latin players coming off the field, maybe it’s time for some Reggaeton to be loud in the hallway and get it going.”
Stephenson and other staffers take requests, screen lyrics — the Peoria Sports Complex is bordered by residential housing — and read the room, adjusting the playlist as conditions require.
Not everyone has mastered the job. Mariners GM Justin Hollander said he only takes particular note of what’s playing when someone forgets to filter explicit lyrics.
“I look and there’s some family back there,” Hollander laughed, “and I’m like, ‘Whoa, whoa, what are we doing? Will somebody call timeout on this song?’”
For others, music is a defining feature. Padres left-hander Jackson Wolf was a music technology minor at West Virginia University. He began learning how to DJ last year while with Double-A San Antonio, using a $30 controller from a pawn shop. Then, on a rehab assignment at the same affiliate, star center fielder Jackson Merrill bought Wolf a proper setup. One morning last month, much to the delight of his teammates, Wolf took requests and spun beats in the Padres’ clubhouse.
Wolf, whose lone appearance in the majors came in 2023, is working his way back to the highest level, careful to establish himself as a pitcher first. His secondary talent might not hurt.
“If we can produce a vibe in the clubhouse and that spills over onto the field,” Wolf said, “that’s all you can ask for at the end of the day.”
Tampa Bay Rays president of baseball operations Erik Neander believes omnipresent spring music may have started about a decade ago. Baseball had always been a traditional sport, resistant to change and self-expression, its atmosphere relatively staid.
“People just went about their work,” Neander said. “And the sounds of fans, the sounds of the ball, the throws … that was your soundtrack, and it was all right.
“But now, when you’re in a park at any level and it’s quiet, it’s like, man, it feels a little off.”
Stammen, the Padres’ first-year manager, describes being taken aback in early 2017. That was the spring he arrived in Peoria after a dozen seasons spent with the Washington Nationals and Cleveland Guardians. The former reliever does not remember hearing much music at the complexes of his old clubs.
Now Stammen cannot imagine returning to relative silence. There is, he said, a philosophical question buried somewhere in all of it.
“Do you need music to provide energy, or can you provide your own energy?” Stammen said. “But I think in a long season like baseball, having a little extra boost is always helpful.”
Preller, for his part, will not claim credit for starting a baseball trend. Few executives have spent more time on backfields across the world, but in a sprawling sport, no one can say for sure that the Padres were first.
What Preller knows is that before he visited Carroll’s Seahawks, Peoria was far quieter. And that the difference was most obvious not when the music started, but on the morning it stopped.
“It seems crazy,” Preller said, “because now it’s just part of everything.”
Fabian Ardaya contributed to this story.