Spring’s Eternal at Dodgertown

Attendance 1953-1957 Brooklyn Dodgers vs. Milwaukee Braves

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Holman duly impressed the Dodgers. He was genuinely interested in having everything fit together perfectly even if it cost him personally, as when he wrote a check to the city for use of apartment buildings nearby Dodgertown, a key to closing the agreement. “We insisted on having those apartments for our staff (married couples) and the press,” said Bavasi.Bill Boeding, Vero Beach Press-Journal, February 20, 1988 “We offered them $100 a month for rent of each apartment. But the city balked at the offer. Holman took out his checkbook and asked the value of the buildings. They said $52,000. Holman started to write out a check for that amount. The city fathers refused to sell. Then they rented ‘em to us...and we closed the deal.”Joe Hendrickson, Dodgertown This would be the start of something big. But, progress was as slow in arriving as Vero Beach’s commerce.

When the Dodgers first agreed to make Vero Beach their spring home in 1948, it appeared to officials that the makeshift facilities for fields would be a deterrent to continuing the relationship in the long term. Primitive was too nice a word to be used for the state of the playing fields. “It was just a poor excuse for a baseball field,” said Hall of Fame center fielder Duke Snider.

“We’d carry a fungo bat in case you had to stop and kill a snake on the way,” said former Dodger star pitcher Carl Erskine.Ibid.

Initially, while the camp was functioning as a training and baseball teaching facility under the tutelage of Dodger President Rickey, the poor field conditions meant the Dodgers would play most of their major league exhibition games in front of crowds in Miami Stadium. The minor leaguers played on the various local fields, including next to the airport, trying to dodge snakes, bugs and all other manner of wildlife among the Florida landscape. Rickey started the morning session with a lecture to the hordes of players and coaches.

Rickey’s desire to find a spring training site that would permit his new star, Jackie Robinson, who had crossed Major League Baseball’s color line as the first African-American player in 1947, to have some normalcy was extremely important. Most Florida communities planted in the depths of the South discriminated against African-Americans, where segregation was a way of life. According to author 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.”Sidney P. Johnston, A History of Indian River County “a sense of place”, page 116

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