Play Ball!

The reporting of pitchers and catchers is a sign that spring is near, and nobody does spring training like the folks at Dodgertown

By Tom Verducci

Trees growing in the middle of the stands at Holman Stadium are among the touches that make Dodgertown unique. Chuck Solomon

It is a myth that time stands still at Dodgertown. Many years have passed, for instance, since a Dodgers player last ate mess hall grub off a Navy-issued, trisected metal serving tray or climbed trees to avoid the night watchman enforcing curfew.

At the team's spring training camp in Vero Beach, Fla., however, time does mosey. It flutters like a soft breeze through the azaleas, palmettos, royal palms and scrub pines in a baseball training facility disguised as an arboretum. With Dodgertown, as with the Acropolis or Sophia Loren, time slows its usual advance when under the spell of archetypal beauty.

"If you don't like Dodgertown," says the team's traveling secretary, Bill DeLury, who is in his 38th spring there, "you don't like peanut butter. It's ... it's ... un-American."

When the ball club isn't there, Dodgertown is also a sports and conference center, so you, too, can bunk where players have for more than half a century. ("Ron Washington Slept Here.") To hook you, the Dodgertown website brags about "world-class recreation facilities, including ... horseshoes." Horseshoes? Did we mention canasta?

Forget Punxsutawney Phil. Pitchers and catchers reporting is the most reliable sign that winter is yielding its icy grip. This week marks the start of our annual renewal of light and soul. A dozen teams begin training in Arizona, most of them in fabulously modern facilities in the Phoenix and Tucson areas. Florida, with its 18 teams spread throughout a home-plate-shaped area with a 677-mile perimeter, is the Greek-diner menu of spring training. It has a little of everything.

Almost 1.4 million fans watched spring training games last year at Florida's 17 camps. (The Florida Marlins and the St. Louis Cardinals share a site.) That does not include the thousands who showed up for workouts to watch the always exciting pitchers-covering-first-base drill.

Spring training in Florida is believed to have started in 1888, when the Washington Senators repaired to Jacksonville for three weeks of camp. Connie Mack, foreshadowing the blurred line between spring training and spring break, once recalled of his days as a catcher, "We played exhibitions during the day and drank most of the night."

The most popular destination is Tampa, where the New York Yankees draw almost as many fans for games that don't count as the Montreal Expos do for regular-season games. The Yankees' Legends Field is a fine facility, as long as your idea of spring training repose is fighting New York-mannered crowds and security while sucking down the exhaust of six-lane traffic on Dale Mabry Highway.

Truth is, if you want real spring training, you go to Dodgertown, otherwise known simply as Vero or colloquially as "the base." Indeed, the tract served as a U.S. Naval air base before the Dodgers moved their spring headquarters there from Havana, Cuba, in 1948. Moving to the Florida site allowed Branch Rickey, the father of the modern farm system, to train all of the organization's players in the same complex. (Rickey also wanted a facility in the segregated South in which his black players would be housed and fed with their white teammates.)

More than 600 players moved into what were built as temporary barracks for servicemen and included wood-plank flooring and three bunk beds to a room. Dodgers of the '50s and '60s were awakened at six each morning by a shrill whistle, hustled to the mess hall to eat breakfast off their metal trays, then drilled on fundamentals all day. In Vero, for instance, Rickey installed his famous "strings" -- the strike zone outlined in string in front of home plate -- which allowed pitchers to work on their control.

For diversions Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley made available Ping-Pong tables, pinball, a nine-hole executive golf course and later a full 18-hole track and basketball and tennis courts. Wives of players and front-office employees sunned at the pool. Movies were shown three times a week.

"I never have to leave the base," says former manager Tommy Lasorda, who, having first arrived at Vero in 1949 as a minor league pitcher, has logged more time in Dodgertown than any other Dodger. "And the food is not pretty good. It's real good."

Of course in decades past players did venture off base for diversions that sometimes kept them out past curfew. In 1961 manager Walter Alston heard Sandy Koufax and fellow pitcher Larry Sherry trying to sneak in past curfew. Alston pounded so hard on Sherry's door that he cracked the diamonds in his 1955 World Series ring. On the team bus the next morning Koufax quipped, "Hey, Larry, had your door appraised for diamonds yet?"

"What makes Dodgertown so special is the campus environment," says Peter O'Malley, who succeeded his father as Dodgers president in 1970 and sold the team in 1998. "It brings everybody together."

Alas, the big league players haven't stayed on base for years. They rent expensive condos near the ocean. In 1972 the barracks were replaced by one-story motel-style accommodations. (The minor leaguers remain on the base, two to a room.) The lavish press room where writers would linger to drink, play cards and tell stories with O'Malley and Rickey has been replaced by a concrete bunker in a two-year-old administration building that also houses the spacious major league clubhouse.

Still, walking the meticulously clipped grounds of Dodgertown is like walking the back nine at Augusta. Over there, behind the old clubhouse, are six pitching mounds shaded by huge palms. The strings are still here. So as not to embarrass him in front of crowds, the Dodgers worked with Koufax here on his early-career control problem. Newcombe, Drysdale, Podres, Sutton, Hershiser ... they all toiled on these mounds.

Way back there, on fields 5 and 6, minor leaguers swat batting-practice pitches into the palmettos beyond the outfield fence. A major league coach rides by on one of the base's many beach bikes. Fans stroll down Don Drysdale Drive and Vin Scully Way, streets dotted with baseball-globed lampposts, with only a yellow rope between them and the ballplayers at work. No other spring training site offers fans better access.

There is Holman Stadium, the main diamond, where neither the stands (of which there are only 17 rows) nor the dugouts are roofed, where orange trees and Southern pines are the centerfield backdrop for hitters and where two oaks grow smack in the middle of the stands. A banner hanging over the main entrance to the complex says, IT'S GREAT TO BE AT DODGERTOWN! And as you pass under it, through a portal to another world, and you hear the crack of bats and thumping of leather from all directions, and you know the dining room will have fresh strawberries and cream, the theater will screen a movie and the pool is open until midnight, you must smile in agreement.

The best vantage point, however, may be high above Dodgertown. From there you see that the man-made lake beside Holman Stadium is carved in the shape of a heart. It was Walter O'Malley's valentine to his wife, Kay. The rest of the 300 verdant acres is a valentine to baseball fans, reminding them what spring training should be.

Issue date: February 23, 2004