Why the Dodgers Left Vero Beach — Vero Beach, Florida

The Dodgers left Vero Beach because a new owner wanted spring training close to the team's fans in Southern California, and because the Vero Beach camp had passed out of the team's hands into public ownership. The club played its last major league spring game at Holman Stadium on March 17, 2008, and the MLB timeline for the Jackie Robinson Training Complex notes that the Dodgers would train in Glendale, Arizona, in 2009. That ended a run of 60 springs at Dodgertown that had begun in 1948.

The road out of Vero Beach ran through three events: the 1998 sale of the club by the O'Malley family, the 2001 sale of Dodgertown to Indian River County, and the 2004 arrival of owner Frank McCourt. Each step loosened the tie between the franchise and the former naval air station on the north side of Vero Beach, and by 2007 the move to Arizona was public.

According to the Indian River Guardian history of Dodgertown, the Fox Entertainment Group bought the Dodgers on March 19, 1998 from Peter O'Malley and his sister, Terry Seidler, for more than $300 million. The Guardian reports that the new owners did not want to own Dodgertown, which had always been an expense to the O'Malley-owned Dodgers, never a profit maker. Fox weighed two options for the Vero Beach camp: sell it and lease it back for a token amount, or move spring training out west.

The question split Indian River County. The Guardian describes fiscal conservatives who opposed spending tax dollars on a private enterprise facing residents who saw Dodgertown as a tourist draw and a landmark. The outcome kept the team for the moment: the county and city bought Dodgertown for $19 million and the Dodgers signed a 20-year lease to stay in Vero Beach. MLB dates the Indian River County purchase of the land and facilities to August 29, 2001, and the Baseball and Dodgertown state marker sums up the arrangement in one line: the Dodgers sold Dodgertown to Indian River County, then leased it back until 2008.

A second sale followed. On January 29, 2004, News Corp sold the Dodgers to Boston developer Frank McCourt for a reported $430 million, the Guardian reports, and it soon became clear that the new owner had other ideas for spring training. The move was announced in 2007, to a new facility in Glendale, Arizona, to be shared with the Chicago White Sox. The Guardian adds that the team's obligation to pay off bonds under its Indian River County contract became the central local issue, and that the county decided to keep the historic complex rather than let it pass to a developer.

Distance from Los Angeles was the core argument. In his March 18, 2008 Sports Illustrated report from Dodgertown, Lee Jenkins laid out the arithmetic: games in Vero Beach start at 10 a.m. PST, the flight from Los Angeles took an entire day, and budget hotels near the freeway could cost close to $200 a room in March. In Glendale, games would start at 1 p.m. Pacific time after a flight of about 90 minutes. The new complex in Glendale will cost $80 million, the magazine reported.

The geography that once made Vero Beach sensible had shifted. Sports Illustrated recalled that when the club played in Brooklyn, New York snowbirds flew south every spring to see the team, and that many kept coming after the 1958 move to Los Angeles. By 2008 that Brooklyn base had aged, and Tommy Lasorda told the magazine the team had to think about fans in Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles Times account of the final game pointed to the ballpark as well. As newer complexes opened across Florida and Arizona, features that once set Dodgertown apart, such as the roofless dugouts and the berms at the edge of the Holman Stadium outfield, began to look outdated and quirky. The same report placed Glendale about a five-hour drive from Dodger Stadium. In a team statement, McCourt said that the inability of many Los Angeles families to make the cross-country trip was the driving force behind the move to Arizona, and he promised that Dodgertown street signs and the light posts topped with baseballs would be moved to Arizona or put on display at Dodger Stadium.

The farewell came on St. Patrick's Day, March 17, 2008. The Dodgers wore green caps and lost 12-10 to the Houston Astros in front of 7,327 people, according to the New York Times report from Vero Beach. Neither the Times nor the Los Angeles Times could call it the definite finale, because there was still some question whether the Glendale complex would be finished in time.

Carl Erskine, 81, played the national anthem on his harmonica. The Times noted that Erskine had pitched the first game at Holman Stadium when it opened on March 11, 1953, 55 years earlier. Tommy Lasorda ran the club that week; Sports Illustrated reports the Dodgers asked him to manage the final week in Vero Beach while Joe Torre was in China with a split squad. Lasorda had stayed in Apartment 112 at Dodgertown every spring since 1976, the Times reported.

After the last out, Dodgers and Astros players cleared the field so Lasorda could walk off alone between two rows of Dodgers holding their bats aloft, the Los Angeles Times reported. The MLB timeline calls it a bat tunnel. The team then played one more Grapefruit League game, against the Marlins in Jupiter, before boarding a charter for Arizona.

The empty camp became a county problem. In December 2008, Indian River County officials, not sure what to do with Dodgertown without a team, decided to shutter the facility, according to MLB. The official Walter O'Malley history of Dodgertown says Dodgertown remained shuttered for nine months until Minor League Baseball reopened it as Vero Beach Sports Village; MLB dates that agreement to May 2009. McCourt, the Guardian reports, had ordered references to the Dodgers and Dodgertown removed, so the new operators had to rebrand the Vero Beach campus from scratch.

Hopes for a replacement major league tenant did not pan out. In March 2008 Sports Illustrated reported that the Baltimore Orioles had been in negotiations to move spring training from Fort Lauderdale to Vero Beach, and the Times also named the Orioles as a possible tenant. The Guardian later wrote that the complex was not enough of an incentive for teams seeking larger deals elsewhere. After Minor League Baseball lost money for two years, the 2010s MLB timeline records that Peter O'Malley formed a partnership in 2012 to manage the property on a lease with Indian River County, the first step toward the site's later life as a youth baseball campus.

The 2008 exit stands out against the length of the earlier commitment. The O'Malley family history records that the Dodgers signed a 21-year lease with the City of Vero Beach during the week of January 31, 1952, at $1 a year, which Walter O'Malley paid up front in cash, with an option to renew for another 21 years. The same history says that no other major league club had a longer running spring contract. That lease predated Holman Stadium, which opened the following year.

Measured against that history, the 2001 public purchase changed the Vero Beach side of the deal. Once Indian River County owned the land and buildings, the team was a tenant on a lease that ended in 2008, and the decision to stay or go rested with an owner based in Los Angeles. The O'Malley history puts the result plainly: under Frank McCourt, the Dodgers pulled up their 60-year roots in Vero Beach and moved their spring headquarters to Glendale, Arizona, in 2009.