Dodgers Finally Leaving New York and Mets Behind

By Mike McGann
Posted Sunday, April 1, 2007

VERO BEACH, Fla. — It is archaic, cramped, painful and hot. And its imminent demise is a sad, final cutting of the apron strings between New York baseball — and the odd link involving the Mets — and Dodgers.

It is Holman Stadium and last Thursday, it was filled to the gills with Mets’ fans and Dodger fans — sporting a combination of Mets, Brooklyn and Los Angeles hats — and a cap with a “B” on it didn’t really clarify your rooting interest.

For 50 years now, even after moving from Flatbush to Chavez Ravine, the Dodgers have come east, come home to their old fans and celebrated baseball in Dodgertown and played baseball in this midget gem of a park. It has the feel of old, long gone Ebbets, with the same sort of colors in the grandstand, the same sort of closeness to the field. It stirs the old ghosts just enough to keep a feint heartbeat alive. The sign advertising the new Vero Beach Devil Rays is enough to flat-line the reading of the truest believer, though.

The magic isn’t going to be coming back any more.

Make no mistake, this is no Tradition Field. The dugouts have no roof and the fans are right down on top of the field and the players. There’s a berm all the way around the outfield — in fact, before 1971, there was no fence, just berm — long before berms became cool ticket marketing. In fact at Holman, the whole field is surrounded by the berm, on which the entire stands were built in 1948, all 17 rows of seats and the storage closet of a press box. There are even trees in the stands, among the seats on the third base side — and not a gimmick, just trees that were there when the field grew up organically around this old air base in the years following World War II.

It is an intimate place, the way so many neighborhoods in Woodside, Flatbush or Corona Park used to be. You feel comfortable talking to your neighbor, sharing stories, maybe letting your kid hear about when Koufax pitched here, or Campy was behind the plate. Those conversations continue during the game, between player and fan — and the fans themselves. Dodger fans and Mets fans come together and revel in their shared legacy — like estranged cousins at a family reunion.

One man, in a Mets’ shirt, talking to another in a Brooklyn Dodgers’ hat, says “that logo” pointing at the Brooklyn hat, “would be on this shirt, if they hadn’t moved” and shakes his head, pointing to his Mets’ t-shirt. Stories are traded back and forth, from Flatbush to Willets Point to Vero Beach — and even to L.A. and the valley.

But the days of this family reunion are numbered — and the evidence is all around. The Vero Beach Dodgers are no more and have been replaced by the ear-jarring Vero Beach Devil Rays in the Florida State League. By 2009, Dodgertown will be Dodgerless, spring training finally moving to Glendale, Arizona — within easy reach of the Dodgers’ fans of the last 50 years, the people of the Los Angeles basin.

Sure, the new CitiField will be a Disneyfied tribute to old Ebbets — but Holman is the real deal, no blaring music between innings, a place where people can and do talk. But it looks like the only sounds that will be heard here on a warm March afternoon in the future will be the sound of planes landing at the nearby Piper Airplane company headquarters adjacent to the local airport.

Until then, with one more ghost-filled spring training, Dodgertown will remain a living lesson about the game, the people who love it — and, to steal a phase, “baseball, the way it ought to be.”

Even cramped, old and showing its age, Dodgertown is class — it’s more of a state of mind than a piece of real estate. Unfortunately, it seems to be the kind of place that is on the endangered species list these days:

A place where it’s all about baseball. Just baseball and nothing but baseball on a warm March afternoon.

Contrast that with Tradition Field — and to be fair, with any number of newish, state-of-the-art spring (or regular season facilities) — music blares, the staff treats the fans like they’re in Gitmo instead of a ballpark and sometimes baseball seems like the least important thing happening.

While the Mets, Yankees, et al. act like a Secret Service detail in protecting their players and staff from the average fan, you can’t walk around Dodgertown without bumping into players, coaches, management and so on. It’s just part of the charm of the place.

A typical Dodgertown story: A loud, obvious New York-accented type is all but yelling into his cell phone: “...So I walk up to Tommy Lasorda and say ‘I hate to bother you, but...’ and Lasorda says ‘So why are you bothering me?’ and walks away. Can you friggin’ believe that?” If you haven’t been to Dodgertown, you can’t, because at Legends Field or dozens of other places, the guy wouldn’t have gotten within 50 feet of somebody like Lasorda.

The public address announcer isn’t marketing driven, he’s folksy and almost chats with the capacity crowd, mentioning in a folksy way how someone from Canada appears to have lost their driver’s license. The ads are few and spaced out.

At Dodgertown, baseball is the star — the only story, the only thing that matters. One wishes that those design elements from old Ebbets were the ones that found their way into CitiField — instead of a rotunda. It’s a gem — seeing a game there is a gift for the soul of a baseball fan, an instant reminder of why we love baseball.

And unless something surprising happens, it’s going to be only a part of spring training history, like that old ballpark in Flatbush — finally severing the last link to New York, the generations of snowbirds who first came to visit their Dodgers in the spring and then decided to stay when they grew older.

While most New Yorkers got over the Dodgers and moved on, ultimately to obsess about the Mets, the people in Vero Beach are living through a slow-motion death of their baseball world, a half-century of tradition, and you have to feel for them.

But maybe, we’re all losing something — not just in the demise of Dodgertown, but that baseball seems to have forgotten what made so many of care about the sport in the first place.

When Dodgertown finally heads to, as Lasorda once put it, “the big Dodger in the sky” Mets’ fans will lose an important link to their team’s history. But baseball will be losing a big chunk of its rapidly shrinking soul.

And that is truly a thing to be mourned.