Dodgertown's charms not lost on Torre, players

This spring SI.com senior writer John Donovan is touring the Grapefruit and Cactus leagues to cover baseball's biggest newsmakers. Today he reports from Dodgers camp in Vero Beach, Fla. Next stop: Indians camp in Winter Haven, Fla., on Tuesday.

Holman Stadium's roofless dugouts make for great access for fans but scorching hot days for players. John Donovan/SI.com

RELATED • GALLERY: Memories of Dodgertown • HOT SPOT: Milledge sounds off at Nats camp

VERO BEACH, Fla. -- To mark the Dodgers' final spring training season in Florida, I am standing in the heart of Dodgertown. It consists of a poured concrete floor, painted -- as you might expect -- Dodger Blue. Its four walls are concrete block, just a shade over a foot or so high, probably not tall enough to reach to the top of a batboy's sanitary socks. There's one step down to get in, and if you ever happen to be standing here while a game is going on, you'd better keep a sharp eye out for flying objects.

And, oh, yes. It can get awfully hot in Dodgertown. Sizzling, in fact. It's the kind of heat that makes you edgy and humorless, makes you feel like a piece of gum on a summer sidewalk. The sun is relentless, and there's no escaping it.

This is Dodgertown; standing shin-deep in one of Holman Stadium's infamous roofless dugouts -- maybe 50 feet long and a few feet wide -- and baking your brains out. There's no place like it in baseball.

Initial impressions

The first time Joe Torre came to Dodgertown as a player, sometime around 1960, he remembers being awestruck. Dodgertown is the kind of place, now all but gone, where baseball royalty meets hometown fan, where any Joe from Brooklyn or any kid from the Valley can almost literally rub elbows with a real big-time athlete. Dodgertown is that way today -- often nothing separates player from fan but a rope -- and it certainly was that way when Torre first came through.

"You look up and there's [Sandy] Koufax and [Don] Drysdale and guys walking around," says Torre, the new manager of the Dodgers. "There were a lot of similarities with the Yankees. You used to go over to Lauderdale and see Catfish [Hunter] and [Mickey] Mantle and Yogi [Berra] walking around. That really gets my attention, more than the place. But the place I found very charming. To me, I've really gotten a taste of it since I've been here, 'cause it's so fan-friendly. You've got to go through the people to do what you need to do."

Nothing, though, in the 220 acres of the former Navy base gets your attention quite like the dugouts in aging Holman Stadium. Literally carved out of the dirt and gravel along the first-base and third-base lines, they are perilously close to the field and scarily close to the fans. In Torre's playing days they didn't even have a screen in front to protect players from foul balls or broken bats. Even now there's only a railing draped with rope netting, still not tall enough to block everything.

And today, as when Walter O'Malley first envisioned his baseball heaven -- minor leaguers living with major leaguers, fans mingling with players, everyone in a spring utopia -- there is nothing over the dugouts to protect players from the elements. The dugouts are, in many ways, what makes this Dodgertown, and what makes Dodgertown unique among baseball parks anywhere.

"I remember my first couple of years in the instructional league, in 1959 and '60, in Bradenton in that old relic of a ballpark, before they updated," Torre said. "They had those old metal roofs on the dugouts. But I'd never been in one without a lid on it."

1 of 2