Dodgertown is closing not a spring too soon

In a couple of weeks, I will embark on an annual rite of passage scented with hope, tinted in promise, an enduring fabric as lovely as all spring.

I will take a five-hour flight on a cramped plane from Los Angeles to Orlando, Fla.

I will rent a car large enough to ward off suitcase-sized bugs.

I will drive that car 90 minutes through darkened, swamp-lined roads to a town that is closed.

I will check into a steamy living space that costs $250 a night.

The next morning, I will drive to an outdated baseball village where players don’t like to stay, and fans don’t like to watch them.

Ah, the romance of Dodgers spring training in Vero Beach.

Buy me some peanuts and cracker jack, I don’t care if I ever get back.

No, seriously. I don’t care.

I’ll happily quaff the shells and caramel corn all the way to Glendale, Ariz., where the Dodgers are moving at the end of spring, for good, forever, amen.

The Dodgers had 51 wonderful years in Dodgertown.

The problem is, they’ve been there 61 years.

Those good old days are long gone, and it only makes sense that the Dodgers disappear with them.

Like an aging Brooklyn snowbird exchanging blank stares with a kid Los Angeles outfielder, the Dodgers and Vero Beach no longer fit.

The Dodgers don’t have many fans there. Their players no longer feel a connection there. Those 10-a.m.-back-home game broadcasts feel alien from there.

Dodgertown has become less a “town” than a museum.

The organization had become more tourists than winter residents.

When I was negotiating for a reasonable room this spring, my 19th in Vero Beach, an agent pumped up a flat rate with astronomical fees.

When I told her I could never ask my newspaper to pay those kinds of fees, she said, “That’s the way it is with all you people. It’s always too expensive for you people. You people should look somewhere else.”

You people? You newspaper people? You tourist people?

“You Dodger people,” she said.

If she was angry that the Dodgers are leaving, I don’t blame her. This will be an angry spring for many locals.

But her words belied an attitude I’ve felt for years.

I can’t imagine anyone in Mesa, Ariz., condescendingly referring to Chicagoans as, “You Cub people.”

That team belongs in its spring-training site, which looks and sounds and feels like it.

The Dodgers no longer belong in Vero Beach, which looks and sounds like a small Midwestern town and sometimes acts like the Deep South.

Eighteen springs, and rarely did I meet a fan there who actually flew out from Los Angeles.

Isn’t that one of the purposes of spring training, to give a team’s fans a place to escape to baseball? Nobody had to travel farther to spring training than Dodgers fans, who, in the end, decided to just stay home.

Most of the Dodgers fans in Vero Beach were Brooklyn fans. As they have disappeared, they have been replaced by Yankees and Mets fans.

That doesn’t leave a lot of people to attend those Monday afternoon games against Baltimore.

Eighteen springs, and rarely did I meet a veteran player who wanted to live inside the Dodgertown gates or embrace the Dodgertown mystique.

As the fans changed, so did the athletes, who made enough money to live in houses and condos far more spacious than the hotel-style rooms.

The complex dining room, once a place where Sandy Koufax would pass the pepper to Maury Wills, had become a refuge of minor leaguers, team officials and Dodgertown Mayor Tom Lasorda.

The best thing about Dodgertown was that, with its twinkling baseball lights and streets like Don Drysdale Drive and Jackie Robinson Avenue, it fostered a Dodgers culture that could carry the team through the summer.

In the end, though, it became just another place for the rich guys to throw their socks.

Eighteen springs, and it’s time to go, and I’m not the only one outside the Dodgers organization who believes this.

Fred Claire, the general manager of the last Dodgers championship team, in 1988, is the epitome of old-fashioned Dodgers grace and smarts.

He spent 30 springs in Dodgertown, living the O’Malley vision, fostering the Dodger Way with late-night meetings and corny themed parties and endless days baking in the Holman Field stands while peering down at prospects sitting on benches with no dugouts.

And even he thinks it’s time to leave.

“Dodgertown was great for a period, it was a great place for Dodger history, but this is a different era,” Claire said. “From a business and practical standpoint, moving the team to Arizona makes all the sense in the world.”

Bob Graziano was Dodgers president when they considered moving out of Florida in the late 1990s, and today feels the same way.

“It’s really hard to walk away from 60 years of history,” he said. “But so much has changed there, it just makes sense.”

Here’s how much sense:

Beginning next year, the Dodgers will be playing to sellout spring crowds in a stadium only five hours from Los Angeles.

Their fans can watch them with little hassle.

The folks in Los Angeles can watch and listen to spring games at reasonable times.

And the deal with the city of Glendale is so sweet, maybe the Dodgers can make enough money to buy another pitcher or two.

“I don’t want to diminish what Dodgertown meant to so many of us, it was a wonderful time they can never take away from us,” Claire said. “But it’s just different now.”

Will the annual spring preaching of Dodgers culture be lost? Nah. Owner Frank McCourt, who deserves much credit for this move, will just have to give Lasorda a different pulpit.

Will the annual spring togetherness be hurt? Nah. As long as there are spring bus rides to tiny spring clubhouses, there will be togetherness.

Will Vero Beach be missed?

For those lucky enough to be there during the days of the O’Malley dream, Dodgertown will live in their memories forever.

For everyone else, including those charged with returning today’s Dodgers to that same glory, it disappeared long ago.

Bill Plaschke can be reached at [email protected]. To read previous columns by Plaschke, go to latimes.com/plaschke.