The Rise and Fall of Dodgertown: 60 Years of Baseball in Vero Beach by Rody Johnson

(University Press of Florida, Paperback, 302pp., $24.95)

Reviewed by Jamie May

           This baseball season, Holman Stadium is the proud home of the Vero Beach Devil Rays, a minor league affiliate of Tampa Bay.  The former Vero Beach Dodgers?  They’re now the San Bernardino Inland Empire 66ers.  And after six decades of training in the same place on the Florida coast every spring, the Dodgers themselves – formerly of Brooklyn, lately of Los Angeles – won’t be returning in February 2009.  Well, okay, the Treasure Coast Palm, Vero’s newspaper, reports hints from the organization that they might be back next year if their new camp in Arizona isn’t ready by the time the pitchers and catchers begin to show up.  But the writing is on the wall: Dodgertown is finished.

Word has it the Orioles might move in if they can work out a deal with the city.  Big whoop.

So Rody Johnson’s The Rise and Fall of Dodgertown comes at a good time.  The place has been eulogized by Sports Illustrated, ESPN, the NY Times, and USA Today, not to mention the LA papers; if you’ve never been there, the book explains what all the hoopla is about.

          If you have been there, you know.  Dodgertown is the oldest spring training facility in baseball.  To enter Holman Stadium you park on the grass west of the field, walk up Dodger Lane and turn right onto Duke Snider Street, then to the gate.  The stadium is small, with a capacity of only 6500, and the players sit in open dugouts just a few yards from the fans in the open bleachers.  It’s like watching a game in someone’s backyard.  Holman didn’t even have a fence around the outfield until 1988; before that, the edge was marked by a grassy berm players sometimes ran over after long fly balls.

Plenty of the anecdotes in Johnson’s book illustrate Dodgertown’s homey charm:  In 1949 team president Branch Rickey forbade players from swimming in the ocean after a rookie third baseman was carried out to sea by an undertow and had to be rescued by an outfielder.  Walter O’Malley, who acquired a controlling interest in the team in ’51, grew orchids at the facility and showed them off to visitors.  Steve Sax, Dodger second baseman during most of the 80s, judged the Vero Beach High School Math Club Beauty Contest in 1981, his rookie year.

Most heartstring-tugging for any baseball fan will be reading about the place at Dodgertown reserved for Roy Campanella, catcher for the Dodgers from 1948-1957.  Campanella, a Hall of Famer, was one of the first black players in the major leagues and won the National League’s MVP award three times.  His career was cut short in 1957 when a car accident fractured two of his vertebrae and paralyzed him below the shoulders.  But two years later he returned to Dodgertown as a coach, and he kept coming back until his death in 1993 at the age of 71.  “After dinner,” writes Johnson, “he sat out back of the barracks kitchen, ‘chewing the fat’ with whoever came along: the kitchen staff, his teammates, or the minor leaguers.  That spot between the main reception hall and the mess hall became known as Campy’s Bullpen.” If there was any doubt, this is the proof: while it lasted, Dodgertown took care of its own. 

Johnson, the author of two other history books, has had ample opportunity to track down stories and factoids like these.  Not only is he a long-time resident of Vero Beach – he was a teenager when the Dodgers came to town in 1948 – the Dodgers also allowed him use of the Dodgertown archive, which he draws on for the many photographs included in the book.  Community knowledge and internal records, plus newspaper archives and previously published Dodger biographies and memoirs, allow him to present an exhaustive survey of the subject.

In fact, his presentation could stand to be a little less exhaustive and a little more considered.  The book is organized by year, starting in 1945 and ending in 2007.  The problem with this?  During some years, nothing very interesting happened.  Do we really need to know that in the spring of 1973, then-team-owner “Peter O’Malley’s in-laws, who lived in Denmark, visited Dodgertown for the first time”?  To fill out some years, Johnson seems to have made a note of every mention of Dodgertown in the local paper.  Elsewhere he appears to be shouting out his favorite local places and people, as when he notes that Waldo Sexton’s Turf Club, where a group of Vero Beach citizens met to protest the city’s challenge to the Dodgers’ lease in 1961, is now the Szechuan Palace restaurant.  Even for the most die-hard Dodger fan, this stuff must be too trivial to qualify as baseball trivia.

This everything-you-never-wanted-to-know-about-Vero-Beach approach is particularly frustrating since Johnson skimps on background elsewhere.  There are at least two fascinating stories to be told – one being how Dodgertown provided the early-integrated Dodgers a haven from Jim Crow laws, the other how free agency and rising player salaries destroyed the profitability of operations like Dodgertown, which, as investments in training up minor league talent, no longer paid significant dividends when veterans started pulling down the really big bucks – neither of which gets the background of national history it deserves.

A final gripe: The Rise and Fall of Dodgertown’s prose hiccups fairly regularly.  Not everyone who writes about the Dodgers has to be Roger Kahn, but in spots it’s hard to know what Johnson means.  In the spring of 1948, the first year the Dodgers organization came to Vero Beach, only their farm teams trained at Dodgertown, while the major leaguers played in the Dominican Republic.  But Johnson notes that outfielder Pete Reiser, a member of the big team, was in Florida, “presumably to work out at first base.  But the real reason revolved around Pete’s wife joining him in the Dominican Republic, contrary to team policy.  The easy solution was to send him and his wife back to Vero”.  He means “ostensibly,” not “presumably.” That’s the kind of mistake that’s easy enough to correct silently as you read.  But it throws into doubt statements like the one found further down on the same page, where Johnson tells us that, during that first spring, players “were also asked to pick the fruit in the grove across the street, but to leave that on the trees around the building for decorative effect”.  Does he really mean that Dodger management required its players to harvest fruit?  (Charming!)  Or has inexact prose obscured the idea that players were allowed to pick the fruit across the street, but asked not to strip the trees near the building?  (Plausible.)

All of which is to say, The Rise and Fall of Dodgertown might be slow going even for Dodger fanatics.  But it is an extremely complete reference work, and now that the team has up and left behind its history in Vero Beach, the book is the closest you can come to visiting the living, breathing Dodgertown.  That alone makes it worth paging through.

Jamie May is an MFA candidate at Florida International University. He lives in North Miami Beach.  He's been to Dodgertown three times, and wishes it were more.