Vero Beach Becomes Dodgers Spring Training Home

Dodgertown is now the Vero Beach Sports Village. The former spring training home of the Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers for 60 years (1948-2008) no longer houses the team. And memories of its opening seem distant.

The Brooklyn Dodgers moved their spring training home to Vero Beach one year after Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color line in 1947. The team had trained in Havana, Cuba that year, but general manager Branch Rickey was looking for a place in the United States that could house his large contingent of minor and major league players.

Enter Vero Beach businessman and airport manager Bud Holman. He came up with the idea for inviting Brooklyn to use an old World War II Naval station as their spring training home. Minor League GM Buzzy Bavasi visited Vero Beach, but Holman never let him near the base. Rickey decided to accept Holman’s offer anyway.

According to writer Sidney P. Johnston, ‘Rickey believed that racism was less prevalent in Vero Beach than most other places in the South. African-American baseball players, like all people of their race, encountered discrimination not only in larger cities, such as Jacksonville and Tampa, but in small towns as well. Jackie Robinson aroused protests in Sanford during his first year in the Dodger farm system, while Jacksonville and Deland closed their stadiums to the integrated Dodger farm system.”

It was very important to Rickey that his team stayed together during spring training. Even in Havana the Dodgers had been housed in separate hotels. So the Vero Beach complex was designed to keep them on base as much as possible. In addition to the baseball facilities a postal station, canteen, barbershop, Western union, offices and lounge were built on the site.

The Dodgers first spring training at Vero Beach began with 26 teams on a site where conditions were terrible. ‘We’d carry a fungo bat in case you had to stop and kill a snake along the way’ said pitcher Carl Erskine. The big league team played its games at Miami Stadium while the minor leaguers played on base fields infested with snakes, bugs and other kinds of wildlife. As for housing there were two barracks built on stilts with no heat or air conditioning. The players slept six to a room.

The Dodgers opened their first spring training exhibition season at Vero Beach with Florida Governor Millard Caldwell throwing out the first pitch. Manager Leo Durocher returned from a one year suspension and shook hands with Commissioner Happy Chandler. Jackie Robinson hit a home run in the first inning as the Dodgers defeated their Montreal farm team 5-4. The game drew a crowd of 6,000 at $1.25 a ticket. And a love affair between team and city was born.

Life magazine found Dodgertown so interesting that they did an April 5 cover story on it.

And now the Dodgers are gone. They left in 2008 for Glendale Arizona where they will share a facility with the Chicago White Sox.

And a part of spring training history went with them.

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