The snow is gone (for now) and it is less than a month until the Cincinnati Reds blow the dust off their bats (although some appear to use bats with dust on them during the season).

It is nearly spring training time and the Reds open their new venue in Goodyear, Ariz. among cacti, rattlesnakes, coyotes and scorpions.

If I sound bitter, well, I loved Sarasota, Fla., where the Reds trained for a decade and where I had a condo on Siesta Key where I could walk out the front door, turn right and walk 20 steps to a white sugary sandy beach.

As my wife, Nadine, said, “I don’t want to go to Arizona, there’s no beach.” To that I said, “Honey, Arizona is all beach. There’s just no water.”

Goodyear, though,  has to be better than Plant City, Fla., where the Reds trained before Sarasota. The Okefenokee Swamp would have been better than Plant City, where there was nothing to do but pick strawberries.

That’s why, I guess, the best stories came out of Plant City. The  players were always looking for entertainment.

Scott Scudder, a high draf pick pitcher, only won 15 games in his three-year career with the Reds and lost 23, but he etched his name in lore during spring training in Plant City.

One day he grabbed pitcher Norm Charlton’s new cowboy boots, put them in a bucket of water and froze the boots in the bucket.

Charlton didn’t get mad. He didn’t get even. He got ahead. When Scudder later left the clubhouse, his Land Rover was on cement blocks and all four wheels were on the vehicle’s roof. Scudder had to put them back on in a driving rainstorm.

Pitcher Randy Myers was a natural nutcase. He kept machetes and hand grenades (presumably not live grenades, but we were never certain) in his locker. There was a retaining pond behind the right field wall, infested with water moccasins, a deadly snake.

One day Myers caught about a half dozen of the serpents and slayed them. He put the dead snakes on a shovel and walked into the clubhouse.

You never saw so many macho athletes knocking over chairs to vacate the room, some of them scrambling atop their lockers.

A 12-foot alligator also lived in that retaining pond, but didn’t bother anybody, usually sunning itself on the far side of the pond.

But owner Marge Schott, an animal lover, decided she wanted to see the gator up close and personal and crept to within 10 feet of it before somebody stopped her.

They immediately named the gator ‘Schotzie,’ but shortly thereafter the gator was processed – a euphemism for turning him into a pair of shoes or a few belts that some of you may be wearing to this day.

In the early 1990s the Reds had another high-choice draft-pick pitcher, Jack Armstrong, a precocious guy. He was 26-32 in his four years with the Reds.

After one season he decided the Reds weren’t offering him enough cash, so he held out, refused to sign. And he said, “I could make more money working on a tuna boat than what the Reds want to pay me.”

When he finally signed, the veterans were ready for him. His Plant City locker was heavily decorated for his return – rain slickers that fishermen wear, a nautical compass, fishing nets, fishing poles, wicker fishing baskets.

And his nickname became Captain Jack Armstrong. Based on his career, tuna fishing might have turned out better for him.

(Cincinnati Reds sports writer Hal McCoy is a Times Community News columnist. McCoy covered the Cincinnati Reds for 37 years. Enshrined in the writer’s wing of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and is the reigning Ohio Sportswriter of the Year is a 10-time winner of the award. He is also the only non-Cincinnati journalist in the Cincinnati Journalism Hall of Fame. Each week McCoy will write about the Cincinnati Reds and Major League Baseball. )