Dodgertown, Usa Vero Beach Celebrates 50 Years Of Living And Breathing Dodger Blue

The navel oranges have been shipped; the Valencias and the Ruby Red grapefruit are making their way from grove to market. But here in Indian River County, the real season has now begun, and the crop, as it has been for half a century, is baseball players.

Of the 18 Florida cities that play host to spring camps, no other town has an identity and an economy so intertwined with a baseball team as Vero Beach has with the Los Angeles Dodgers.

This is the Dodgers’ 50th season here, an association that began a decade before Walter O’Malley moved the team to Los Angeles from Brooklyn. His predecessor, Branch Rickey, set up camp here in 1948 on the site of an abandoned naval training station in the days of Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese. Whatever the upheaval since then, including the recent announcement that the Dodgers are for sale, Vero Beach has been a symbol of continuity.

“I don’t believe Vero Beach would be known anywhere outside of Vero Beach except for the presence of the Dodgers,” said Vin Scully, the Dodgers broadcaster, who has been coming here since 1950. “When I first arrived, we stepped off the train and, my gosh, it was a tiny, tiny, somewhat dusty little Southern town. But as the Dodgers settled in, as the word went out, the Dodgers truly put Vero Beach on the map.”

Indeed, it is difficult to separate Vero Beach from baseball, and not just in the spring. The Dodgers maintain their 468-acre camp year-round, with a Class A minor-league team, fantasy camps, training for football teams and foreign baseball clubs, two golf courses and a commercial citrus grove. After spring training, a 90-room inn for players serves as an executive conference center. All that activity makes the Dodgertown complex one of Indian River County’s biggest private employers, with an annual payroll of $4 million and a work force reaching 450 in the spring. It is the only camp where a ball club is the owner, not a tenant.

“We’re not just a baseball team that flies in Feb. 1 and leaves on opening day,” said Craig Callan, a Brooklyn native who has spent 19 years at Dodgertown, nine as director. “We’re year-round, tax-paying members of the community.”

The team leaves a mark on the city’s 18,000 residents.

When Tommy Lasorda, the motivational former Dodger manager, spoke at a Little League opening day last year, “some of the mothers were in tears,” said Chuck Sultzman, a local biologist for the federal Fish and Wildlife Service and the father of a 13-year-old center fielder for the Seald-Sweet Growers team. “The Dodgers being here has a profound effect on these kids.”

Local teenagers serve as bat boys; families house minor-league players during the season. And it is a rite of spring to happen upon stars like Mike Piazza and Eric Karros at the next table at a pizza parlor.

At the local newspaper, The Press Journal, deadlines are pushed back during the season to include West Coast scores because “so many people follow the Dodgers,” said John Schumann, whose family published the paper for 70 years. At Hyatt Fruits, the owner, Tom Jones, draws in customers for his gift boxes by giving away two tickets a day to spring training games.

When Dodgers players talk about training here - on fields bordered by streets like Don Drysdale Drive and Sandy Koufax Lane - the word “mystique” is often invoked.

“There’s something definitely unique about it,” said Todd Zeile, a third baseman spending his first spring as a Dodger after eight major league seasons. “You get to talk to fans up close.”

This spring, however, a cloud hovers over Vero Beach. Since the O’Malley family’s announcement in January that the Dodgers are for sale, there has been anxious speculation here that a new owner might be wooed to more lucrative spring pastures. And Vero Beach is determined not to become another Brooklyn.

“If the Dodgers were to leave, it would be a calamity, a catastrophe - economically, socially and psychologically,” said Mayor Jack Grossett, a Pittsburgh Pirates fan before moving here 10 years ago. “People are saying they wouldn’t leave Vero Beach, couldn’t leave Vero Beach, but you and I know they could.”