VERO BEACH, Fla. -- There's no cheering in the press box. But nobody said anything about crying.
So when former pitcher Carl Erskine, resplendent in Dodgers whites, stepped onto the field with a harmonica Monday to play the national anthem before what may prove to be the Dodgers' final game after 61 springs at Dodgertown, it proved too much for one radio reporter, who pulled off his glasses and dabbed at his eyes with a handkerchief.
And he wasn't alone.
"It's St. Patrick's Day. I'm Irish. And I've never felt so little like celebrating in my life," said Clifford Bombard, a Dodgers fan from Virginia who was born the same year -- 1948 -- the Dodgers started training in Vero Beach. "It's a little bittersweet. I understand why they're going and all that stuff. But I'm still going to miss the heck out of them."
Where the Dodgers hope to be going is Arizona, where they expect to move into an $80-million, state-of-the-art training complex next spring. But there is some question whether the facility will be completed in time to the team's satisfaction. And while that issue could be resolved within the next few days, the lingering doubts prevented the team from definitively calling Monday's 12-10 loss to the Houston Astros their last game in Vero Beach.
But the fans knew.
"It is a little sad for the people of Vero because they are losing a lot of history," said Brandon Smith, a 22-year-old Dodgers fan from Woodland Hills who made the trip to Dodgertown to say goodbye. "As a fan living in L.A., I'm glad they're moving to Arizona because it's so much closer.
"But because this place has so much history," he said, it's unfortunate "that it's going away."
Nancy Taylor, a Brooklyn native who, like Bombard, was born the year the Dodgers moved to Vero Beach, was more direct.
"I think it stinks," she said.
When former Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey moved his team's spring home to a former World War II Navy base in 1948, he was lauded as a visionary. There, more than 600 players from all 26 Dodgers farm teams slept in military barracks and trained on several fields around the sprawling campus.
Over the years a golf course and a movie theater were added. The barracks were eventually torn down and replaced by "villas" to house the players and staff. But none of that could make up for the fact that with the Dodgers now playing in Los Angeles, not Brooklyn, fewer fans bothered to make the trek to Florida. And as modern training complexes began to spring up all over Florida and Arizona, the features that used to stamp Dodgertown as unique -- such as the roofless dugouts and the berms at the edge of the Holman Stadium outfield -- began to be seen as outdated and quirky.
