The 1923-24 Santa Clara Baseball Club is ranked by many historians and baseball aficionados as the greatest team in the long and storied history of the pre-revolutionary Cuban League. Their 112 game margin of victory was the largest in 83 years of league play, and they have been compared to the 1927 New York Yankees. They were so dominant that attendance waned, and the league abruptly ended the season in midstream. Santa Clara was declared champion and summoned to the national capital to play in a tournament against runners-up Habana and Almendares, both bolstered by players from last place Marianao, which was dropped from the competition.

Forced to play all of their games in Havana, Santa Clara struggled to cap their league title with the Gran Premio as well, but the second season lingered a little too long. By the time it was over, most of the league’s players, American and Cuban alike, had departed for spring training in the States, and nobody much cared who won.

Baseball first came to Cuba about the time of the U.S. Civil War and soon became the island’s national pastime. Play began in the Cuban League in 1878, just two years after the National League’s first season in the United States. Article 98 of the Cuban league statutes, which prohibited men of color from playing in the league (while failing to prevent teams from hiring exceptional blacks and mulattos), was abrogated in 1900. Afro-Cubans immediately took their rightful place among the league’s top players. They were joined in 1907 by African Americans from leading U.S. black clubs, as well as U.S. whites, mostly from the minor leagues. Cubans, white and black, also were going to the U.S. to play in organized baseball or the Negro Leagues, and the Cuban League arranged its schedule to coincide with the winter off-season in the States.

Although Cuban teams integrated quickly after racial barriers fell, some were predominantly white, while others featured a majority of black players. Some teams were all Cuban, others predominantly North American. None, however, was more dominated by players from the U.S. Negro Leagues than the Santa Clara club of 1923-24. There were nineteen players on the roster over the course of he season, eighteen black and one white, eleven American and eight Cuban. Each of them played in the Negro Leagues, and were among those league’s biggest stars. The manager was a club owner and manager in the Negro National League, making it easy for him to contact players seeking winter employment.

What brought this sterling collection of talent to a small provincial capital in Central Cuba to play in a league that had generally scheduled all of its games in one stadium in Havana is of some interest. That the team had begun only the season before— and quit the competition in mid-season over a questionable decision that the locals felt had been engineered to impede first- place Santa Clara’s quest for a league championship—increases the intrigue. When the team was broken up the following season and failed to compete at its previous high level, the fans stayed away and the franchise was moved, again in mid-season. That the ball club only existed for two partial seasons and one truncated one plus an aborted tournament makes this an amazing story.

The most powerful figure in the Cuban League during the first three decades of the 20th century was Abel Linares. He owned both of the “eternal rivals,” the Alendares and Habana clubs, as well as Havana’s Almendares Park, where all league games were played. He held various positions in the league administration, but his power was supreme regardless of any official title. It is difficult for those familiar only with the structure of the U.S. Major Leagues to comprehend how one man could so dominate baseball in an entire country. His influence reached even from beyond the grave, as his widow owned both eternal rivals from the time of his death in 1930 until the mid-1940s.

Linares had owned an early Cuban Stars team in the U.S., but his influence stateside was limited. For that he was dependent on his right-hand man, Augustin (Tinti) Molina, a former player in Cuba and the U.S. who owned and managed the Cuban Stars in the Negro National League from 1921 through 1931. The Cuban League struggled to find teams to compete with the eternal rivals and fill out the league schedule. For the 1922-23 season the Marianao team, based like the rivals in Havana, was added, along with a club that Linares owned and Molina managed in Santa Clara, capital of the province of the same name which was ever, was more dominated by players from Negril to Las Villas and is now known in its much Leagues than the Santa Clara club of Villa Clara.

The city of Santa Clara had a population of 63,151 as of December 31, 1923, ranking sixth in a country whose capital was the only city of over 100,000. The hub of a vast agricultural region in the center of the island, Santa Clara’s livelihood was originally based on livestock but diversified into a sugar and tobacco center with the coming of the railroad. The economy boomed as the city developed into a country whose economy boomed as the city developed into a major rail junction at the meeting place of north-south and east-west lines. The region’s relative prosperity was one reason that Linares decided to locate a team there in an attempt to increase interest in the league and broaden its fan base. Surely another factor was its location, 190 miles east-southeast of Havana, which made it an easy train ride from the capital. Santa Clara also had a reputation as a good baseball town, with teams and leagues throughout the province from the earliest days of the sport in Cuba.

Slavery has had a definite impact on Cuban demographics. During the first half of the 19th century, Cuba had a majority of blacks and mulattos, although whites officially constituted the majority beginning in 1859. One-third of the slaves worked on sugar plantations, with a similar percentage initially on coffee estates, although that number declined to almost nothing by 1860. Historian Hugh Thomas believes that more than 50,000 slaves may have been brought to Cuba from 1820 to 1865, but none have been documented after that date. Slavery was abolished as of 1888, although with little change in the social status of Afro-Cubans. The non-white minority numbered just over 600,000 by 1907, which was less than 30% of the total population, but raised expectations after the 1895-98 war for independence from Spain were not realized.

Black political solidarity, as expressed in a 1912 uprising, was diluted in the next decade, as over 150,000 black laborers were brought in from Haiti and Jamaica, and the farther removed from revolutionary wars, the more that blacks were excluded from political and cultural developments. Until 1959, black rights were virtually ignored, even by non-white politicians. American colonial domination, which replaced Spanish rule in 1898, was effectively ended by the communist revolution, as was racial segregation. Blacks and mulattos, however, remain a political and economic underclass in communist Cuba—this despite once again constituting (due to white emigration to the U.S.) a 62 majority on the island.

Santa Clara was an interesting choice for Linares and Molina to locate a nearly all-black baseball team in 1922. Despite a history of rigid racial segregation—the central Parque Vidal still features a double-wide sidewalk that once was divided by an iron fence to separate black and white strollers—the city had a reputation for tolerance that was manifested in fan acceptance of black players. Acceptance is perhaps not a strong enough word. Elderly fanaticos today remember black players, especially Americans from the 1930s, with an awe bordering on reverence. It is perhaps appropriate in a city that has embraced ballplayers of all hues that the Villa Clara entry in the late 20th-century Serie Nacional, revolutionary Cuba’s overwhelmingly black amateur major league, has more white players than most other teams.

Molina assembled a powerhouse that began league play with a home double header on November 26, 1922, at Boulanger Park on the west bank of the Rio Cubanacay, losing to Marianao 5-2 in the debut game for both new clubs and taking the nightcap 2-1 for Santa Clara’s initial Cuban League victory. The outfield of native son Alejandro Oms and Pablo “Champion” Mesa from the nearby port of Caribbean flanking U.S. Hall of Famer Oscar Charleston was one of the finest to ever play the game, and Americans Oliver “Ghost” Marcelle and Frank Warfield were among the best at third and second. The American righty-lefty pitching tandem of Bill Holland and Dave Brown led a crew of talented Cubans that found itself in first place in mid-January 1923. The team was nicknamed the Leopardos, or Leopards, a powerful animal in the mode of the Habana Leones (lions) and Almendares Alacranes (scorpions). Like other Santa Clara teams in various sports over the years, however, they frequently were called the Pilongos.

Pilongos means those who are baptized in the same font, and in Santa Clara at the time that was literally true. There was a pool beneath a waterfall in the Cubanacay, near where it ran behind the since-demolished main church, where local babies received the baptismal rites. To this day, natives of Santa Clara are known as Pilongos.

The club, known to the press as “Santa” during its initial season, left the league at a time when it was battling for the lead, with Charleston and Oms 1-2 in batting with averages well over .400. The dispute came to light in the newspapers on January 14 with the publication of a formal document dated January 11 and signed by league officers. The situation stemmed from the reluctance of the Havana teams to participate in Sunday morning games in Santa Clara, with Marianao contending that its 8-5 loss to the home team on Sunday, January 7, violated a new league policy outlawing them. The officials declared the results and all statistics of that game null and void. Following a 12-7 loss to Habana on January 13, Santa Clara withdrew from the league in protest. At a meeting two days later, the league accepted that decision and ruled the club’s remaining twenty-seven games forfeited. Havana newspaper comments, although expressing regret at the loss of the Santa Clara team, revealed a condescending prejudice against the city that it represented, perhaps suggesting that the allegations of a plot by those in the more sophisticated capital city may not have been totally unfounded. Whatever his motive, Linares paid off the Santa Clara players and sent them home. By January 19, all of the Americans on the club had left the island, and Linares’ eternal rivals were left to finish the season with Marianao at Almendares Park.

With no mention of the events of the previous season, and with the sole stipulation that games rained out or otherwise suspended in Santa Clara would be made up in Havana, Santa Clara entered the 1923-24 campaign with a stacked deck, a team so powerful that its supremacy could not be questioned or compromised by anyone.

From the onset of the season in October, the Leopardos dominated the Havana clubs, opening up by mid-January an 112 game lead over Habana, with pre-season favorite Almendares standing 11 games below .500. Eight of the players would later join manager Molina in the Cuban Hall of Fame. Holdovers from the 1922-23 squad included American infielders Marcelle and Warfield, whose names would be forever linked in infamy, and American pitchers Holland and the mysterious Brown. Returning Cubans included catcher Julio Rojo, infielder Matias Rios, and pitcher Eustaquio “Bombin” Pedroso. Most significantly, the outfield of Oms, Charleston, and Mesa returned intact.

Homegrown left fielder Alejandro Oms was an example of the prodigious talent the Pilongos displayed at every position. The left hander was a natural hitter who possessed both speed and power. He had begun his Cuban career the previous season as a 27-year-old rookie, en route to a .351 average over fifteen seasons on the island, second by a point behind Cristobal Torriente as the best career mark by a Cuban player, and fourth best in league history. He also starred in the States with the Cuban Stars of the Eastern Colored League, where he was known as a great center fielder, and incomplete records show a .306 mark for 11 recorded Negro League campaigns. Known as “El Caballero” for his gentlemanly demeanor, he was said to have never argued with an umpire nor been in a fight.

He led the Cuban League once each in home runs and runs scored, twice in hits, and three times in average, including a record .432 for Habana in 1928-29. That season he was the second recipient of Cuba’s version of a MVP award, “Player Most Useful to his Club.” His 11 seasons hitting .300 or better tied a Cuban record, and he holds the mark for doing so in eight consecutive seasons (1922-23 through 1929-30). He was the first to get six hits in a Cuban game and ranked sixth in career runs scored.

Pablo Mesa played in the same outfield with Oms in the States as well, hitting .283 over six seasons with the Cuban Stars. A superb fielder, he was also an outstanding offensive player blessed with speed and power, He was a fine bunter and a baserunner who is remembered in Cuba as having been thrown out sometimes because he was so fast he tended to overrun a base. His best recorded mark in the Negro Leagues was 14 steals in 47 games in 1924. In his best season as a hitter at home, he exceeded Oms with a .433 mark in 1926-27, when both played for Marianao in the Campeonato triangular, a rival league that played its games in the new Stadium Unuversitario of the University of Havana. Oms and Mesa had begun the season with the Cuba club in the Cuban League but defected to the new league after a hurricane destroyed Almendares Park. Mesa’s six-year Cuban average was .332.

Oscar Charleston was a player for whom so many superlatives have been used that the mind boggles at how good he must have been. Called the “Black Ty Cobb” for his speed and aggressive style, his power and build brought comparisons to Babe Ruth and his play in center to Tris Speaker. Some believe that such analogies fail to do justice to Charleston’s talents. Umpire Jocko Conlan called him the best Negro player of his time. In an article about a 1999 SABR poll of the top Negro League figures, in which Charleston finished fourth (just ahead of Josh Gibson and Rube Foster) and appeared on 96.5 of ballots, Sports Collectors Digest called him “perhaps the greatest of Negro League players.”

But many who saw him play called him simply the greatest baseball player ever, including such authoritative voices as Giants’ Manager John McGraw, Negro League player-managers Ben Taylor and Buck O’Neil, umpire George Moriarty, and sportswriter Grantland Rice. In the Negro leagues, available records show a .349 average over 26 seasons, most notably for his hometown Indianapolis ABC’s, the Harrisburg Giants, Homestead Grays, and Pittsburgh Crawfords, where he switched to first base and was player-manager of what is generally considered to be the best black team ever. In Cuba, his .361 career average was exceeded only by fellow Negro Leaguer Jud Wilson. He twice led the Cuban League in runs and stolen bases, including 1923-24, when he swiped 31 bags, the third-best mark in league history and three less than his top Negro League mark. He also was the Cuban leader once each in average, home runs, triples, and hits during his nine years there.

Oliver Marcelle was one of the great third baseman in Negro League history, known for his defensive wizardry, baserunning skills, and a fierce temper. Regarded as the best at his positioning the 1920s, he was picked over Hall of Famers Judy Johnson and Roy Dandridge in a 1952 Pittsburgh Courier poll and by John Henry Lloyd for his all-time team in 1953. Playing primarily for the Royal, Bacharach, and Lincoln Giants, he hit .304 over 13 U.S. seasons and .305 for eight years in Cuba. His .393 mark for the 1923-24 Leopardos led the Cuban League. Second baseman Frank Warfield was a great fielder and baserunner. He hit .264 in 17 Negro League seasons and .304 for four years in Cuba. Although the only starter for the 1923-24 Leopardos to hit below .300 for a regular season, he led the Grand Premio in stolen bases.

The starters were rested frequently and sometimes played out of position, giving reserves like Mayari a chance to shine. Molina was apparently getting players ready for the season in the U.S. and seemingly used the Grand Premio as sort of an extended spring training. After all, the Leopardos had nothing to prove, having already won a championship. Fatigue from playing all year was also catching up to them, and they began a slump which lasted through the second series and found Santa Clara barely able to score as each player’s hitting ability deserted him. After a 4-0 loss to Habana, the Leopardos regrouped and registered back-to-back triumphs against Almendares. They won 5-4 behind Oms’ triple, then held on to win 10-9 after leading 10-0 with 2 home runs by Marcelle and Mesa, giving themselves a half-game second-series lead over the Alacranes on March 2. That lead was short-lived, however, as Almendares recovered to pound Currie and Mendez for a 13-2 victory on March 5.

By this time all three teams were losing players, and with the departure of Charleston, then Douglass, and finally Duncan, the Pilongos were having difficulty just getting nine men on the field. After a 5-2 loss to the Leones on March 15, Santa Clara stood last at 4-6 for the secondseries, two games behind leader Almendares, and it was announced that those two clubs would play one game at 10:00 a.m. the next day to decide the winner of the Grand Premio, with Holland scheduled to pitch against Lucas Boada.

There was an urgency to determine a champion while there still were some players left on the island, but even after shortening the second series, it apparently was too late to save face with a one-game playoff. The game was never played, and with no further word of this proposed contest, final statistics were published on March 17, and standings were printed for each series. League officials were to meet that afternoon to clarify the situation, but no mention of the results of such a meeting can be found, nor is there any determination of prize money distribution noted. The same article in the Diario de la Marina that announced the meeting left no doubt about the reason for the abrupt ending of play, reporting the departure of Dibut and Habana pitcher-manager Adolfo Luque for the Cincinnati Reds’ camp in Orlando, as well as other players from each Grand Premio squad to various minor-league training sites. Cumulative standings for the Grand Premio give Santa Clara a total record of 13-12, .520, a half-game better than Habana’s 13-13 and one up on 12-13 Almendares. Historians recognize the Leopardos as Grand Premio champion, while contemporary accounts indicate that the tournament was met with ongoing fan indifference despite the closeness of teams.

Was the 1923-24 Santa Clara club Cuba’s greatest professional team? Comparisons between eras are difficult, although the players and the numbers should speak for themselves. They cannot be called a dynasty, because the core group remained together for only three seasons, each of which was essentially terminated by mid-January. Linares apparently tired of allowing a team from outside Havana dominate league play, as Charleston, Duncan, Douglass, Moore, and some key pitchers and reserves were not kept on for the 1924-25 season. Fan support dwindled with the declining won-lost record. The season was divided into two series, with Santa Clara third at 14-15, .483 for the first half, which ended on Christmas Day. Santa Clara began the second series with a “home” game at Matanzas on December 27, losing 14-5 to Almendares, Charleston’s new team, as the ex-Leopardo cracked three doubles. The Pilongos stood at 1-6, .143 in Series Two when the franchise was officially shifted to Mtanzas on January 8. The last game in Santa Clara had been on January 3, an 8-6 loss to Marianao.

The outfield of Oms, Charleston, and Mesa draws comparisons to other great combos but suffers from its scant two seasons as a unit. Oms, a great centerfielder in his own right, was forced to play out of position in deference to Charleston. The greatest outfield in the Negro Leagues is generally thought to have been that of the Eastern Colored League Cuban Stars, which had Oms in center flanked by Bearnardo Baro (and later Martin Dihigo) and Mesa. The Baro-Oms-Mesa combine of 1923 and 1924, which played summers at the same time as the Santa Clara winner trio, must be considered inferior to the Leopardo outfield if only because of Charleston. The best Major League threesome probably was Duffy Lewis, Tris Speaker, and Harry Hooper of the 1910-15 Boston Red Sox. This grouping had the advantages of longevity and two U.S. Hall of Famers and probably should get the nod for all-time greatest, but for a brief period, the 1922-24 Leopardos outfield was unsurpassed as an offensive and defensive presence.

The Cuban League did not return to Santa Clara until 1929, and that team disbanded along with the league fivedays into the 1930- 31 season. The next Santa Clara team in the league began play in 1935-36 and may be classified as a dynasty. Under Dihigo and then Lazaro Salazar, these Leopardos won three championships in their first four years and were denied four straight by losing a three-game playoff to Marianao in 1936-37 to settle a disputed first-place tie. Santa Clara left the Cuban League for good in 1941 but had strong professional teams over the next two decades, playing as an independent or in regional circuits.

Teams representing the province fared well from the beginning of the post-revolutionary Serie Nacional, and the Villa Clara Naranjas are a power in Cuba today. The Naranjas are led by the heavy-hitting Eduardo Paret, Cuba’s most dangerous base runner and an acrobatic shortstop who stands out in a country blessed with a number of greats at that position. A 1996 Olympian, Paret was suspended and lost his spot on the National Team for minor infractions marking him to the authorities as a threat to defect, but he returned to league play in 1998 without missing a beat. Catcher Ariel Pestano and left fielder Oscar Machado are currently on the National team. Boulanger Park is today configured for football (soccer) , and is shared by the city’s youth and adult soccer teams. The old wooden grandstand is gone. Just down the street and across the river is modern and spacious Estadio Augusto Cesar Sandfino, home of the Naranjas. Santa Clara is famed as a city where the revolutionary victory was won, and Che Guevara’s remains now reside in a gigantic mausoleum/museum. The city still ranks sixth in population, at an estimated 205,400 in 1994.

A number of the participants in the 1923-24 Santa Clara championship season fared poorly in the years immediately following. At a time when life expectancies were generally in the low 30s for blacks in the U.S. as well as Cuba, careers and lives were prematurely snuffed out. Four of the American players had their careers ended in their primes, due to apparent acts of violence involving women, cocaine, and gambling. The well-liked Brown, an ex-con, was the first to disappear from baseball. Wanted for murder after a 1925 barroom fight, reputedly over cocaine, he barnstormed as a fugitive and played for semi-pro teams in small Midwestern cities under an alias. Some reports indicate that he died in Denver under mysterious circumstances. Next to go was Moore, who in 1926 was shot in the leg by a female acquaintance, suffering multiple fractures that ended his time as a player. The handsome Marcelle left first-class play, perhaps in embarrassment, after former teammate Warfield bit off part of his nose in a 1930 craps-game fight in Cuba. Warfield was in Pittsburgh as player-manager of the Washington Pilots in 1932 when he died of a heart attack in another unusual incident, after being rushed bleeding to the hospital in the company of a woman.

Three Cubans on the 1923-24 team died young from infectious disease. Rios was the first of the unfortunate trio, succumbing in July 1924, a month after having been sent home to recover his health while playing for the Cuban Stars. Mendez, who managed and pitched the Monarchs to victory in the first Colored World Series, died of bronchial pneumonia or tuberculosis in 1928, not many months after retiring as an active player. Montalvo died of tuberculosis in 1930.

Not all of the erstwhile Leopardos were star-crossed. Oms died in 1946, honored in a proclamation by the mayor of Santa Clara as a great gentleman and ballplayer, and his funeral was a major event in his hometown. Dibut had a disappointing career with the Reds. After going 3-0 with a 2.21 ERA in 1924, he was unable to retire a batter in his first outing the following season and was banished from the majors, never to return. His life was as long as his big-league career was short. The last on the team to pass, he died in Hialeah in 1979 at age 87. Rojo managed and coached in Cuba and Mexico into the 1950s.

Douglas, who had been a player-manager for the Royal Giants, later operated a poolroom in New York City. Duncan, married to blues singer Julia Lee, ran a tavern in Kansas City after stints as a manager and umpire in the Negro Leagues. Like Marcelle, his son played briefly in the black leagues. Holland was another of the Pilongos to manage in the Negro Leagues.

The last of the players from1923-24 to wear a uniform in the U.S. was the great Charleston. Even after integration, the old war-horse stayed in the Negro Leagues, managing the Philadelphia Stars through 1950. Though the surviving Negro American League was not as strong as in earlier days, Charleston got the best from his players. He made a comeback in 1954, and skippered the Indianapolis Clowns to the NAL title. In October of that year he fell down a flight of stairs after suffering a stroke or heart attack and died in Philadelphia eight days before his sixtieth birthday.

It was 1947, and Branch Rickey had two spring training problems, both of his own making. Bud Holman had one, but it loomed large for him.

It took Rickey and Holman a while to find each other, but they proved to be each other’s solutions. The relationship they established, despite rocky moments, has endured for over half a century. Vero Beach, then a community of 3,000 people clinging to the east coast of Florida, has become a city of over 18,000 people identified with the Dodgers and spring training.

At the end of 1942, Rickey had taken over management of the Brooklyn Dodgers. He knew that for his new team to dominate, he could not just imitate the success he’d had with the St. Louis Cardinals. Too many other teams had begun to build minor league farm systems for him to think that tactic alone would propel the Dodgers to the top and keep them there.

Rickey took a couple of new directions. Unlike other baseball executives, he calculated World War II would end. Other teams cut back on their scouting because young men were going into the military. Rickey expanded his effort, and signed hundreds of promising players before they disappeared into the service. He also decided to break baseball’s unwritten ban on African-American ballplayers. In late 1945, the Dodgers top farm team in Montreal announced they had signed Jackie Robinson, a shortstop for the Negro Leagues’ Kansas City Monarchs.

The first decision meant he’d need a spring training site where he could work with the 700 or so ballplayers the Dodgers had under contract. The second decision meant he’d need a place where the weather as warm but the South’s code of racial separation would not be enforced. In 1946, the Dodgers went to Daytona Beach. In 1947, it was Cuba, plus other Caribbean stops. The minor league organization had spent those years in the Florida cities of Sanford and Pensacola, where former military bases offered feeding and housing facilities.

Those experiments had been expensive and, in some senses, unsatisfactory. In 1947, the major league team had lost $25,000 on spring training because of higher travel and lodging costs. The Pensacola minor league camp had cost $127,000.1 In both Daytona Beach and Havana, Robinson and other African-American players were placed in segregated housing. The Caribbean itinerary also meant the Dodgers didn’t face major league teams for most of spring training. They played the Montreal Royals. This was part of Rickey’s plan to let the Dodgers appreciate Robinson’s skills in preparation for his promotion, but it also reduced the overall level of competition. And, because the minor leaguers were elsewhere, Rickey hadn’t been able to organize the training program as thoroughly as he would like.

Bud Holman’s problem was the Navy’s decision to turn back the flight training base it had created out of Vero Beach’s prewar municipal airport.2 Holman had parlayed exceptional skills as a mechanic into, first, a Cadillac dealership in Vero Beach, Florida, then acres of orange groves and cattle ranches in the area. He’d also managed to persuade Eastern Airlines to make Vero Beach a stop on its flights up and down the eastern seaboard despite the city’s having little to offer the airline except Holman’s reliable service. Holman had wound up on Eastern’s board of directors.3

The Navy hadn’t used the base for nearly two years, and its facilities, many built with the idea they only had to last a few years, had begun to deteriorate. Holman had browbeaten the Navy into repairing the runway lights and making sure three of the base’s seven runways were operable, but he wasn’t sure how the airport could be made to pay for itself and help Vero Beach grow.4

The 1947 experience in Pensacola had made Rickey aware of the advantages of former military bases. The facilities the military had built to house and feed thousands of men only a few years earlier meant the Dodgers were spared expensive construction. They merely had to create diamonds, batting cages, pitching mounds, sliding pits, and similar facilities. As the 1947 season unfolded, Rickey was looking for something more permanent and more profitable. He examined El Centre, California, and other sites in the west as well as prospecting around Florida.5

Holman, who acknowledged he hadn’t known much about baseball, said he’d heard Rickey was looking for a former military base through a friend of one of Rickey’s daughters.6 He’d also evidently tapped into friends at Eastern Airlines and at General Motors.7 In the early fall of 1947, Buzzie Bavasi took a train ride down to Vero Beach to look at the base and estimate the cost of converting it to meet the Dodgers’ needs.8  Although the public announcement of a deal wasn’t made until December 11, 1947, Rickey was telling the Dodgers’ board of directors as early as October that he expected a “favorable” deal for next spring in Vero Beach.9

The five-year deal called for the Dodgers to pay $1 a year in rent for 104 acres while taking over responsibility for maintaining the existing barracks facilities in their area and building their own baseball training facilities.10 The city of Vero Beach, while giving up any significant revenue from the property, was hoping the publicity attendant to spring training and the crowd of New York writers who would come with it would raise the city’s tourism profile both in New York and around the country.

For 1948, the Vero Beach complex, which Rickey christened “Dodgertown,” was still a minor-league site. The Dodgers trained in the Dominican Republic, where they received a $60,000 subsidy from the government.11 They played just a couple of quick exhibition games in Vero Beach against the Montreal Royals.

However, the organization lost money again and the strain of racial relationships continued to plague the team.12 Sam Lacy, the veteran sportswriter for the Baltimore Afro-American who covered all of Jackie Robinson’s early spring trainings, says one of the reasons the Vero Beach complex was so appealing was that the Dodgers would provide the police service on their property, reducing the possibility of confrontations between their growing cadre of black stars and the local police.13

In 1949 the Dodgers joined the minor-league teams for the early weeks of spring training before moving to Miami to begin exhibition play. This would set the pattern for most of the 1950s. The Dodgers would play up to four major-league exhibition games in Vero Beach each year, with the proceeds of one game going to the city to supplement the $1 year rent. But, in an effort to offset the spring-training costs, many exhibition games would be played in Miami or on a barnstorming tour back to Brooklyn or Los Angeles. The spring-training costs also were offset by the sale of ballplayers force-fed through the Dodger system and the spring camps.

By 1951, Walter O’Malley had replaced Rickey as president of the team. While O’Malley had reservations about the original Vero Beach deal, he had come to accept it as useful, especially after Bavasi pointed out to him that the camp allowed players both to be pushed ahead with intensive instruction and to be showcased for sale to other organizations.14 Still, O’Malley hoped to get more. The Miami stay raised spring-training revenues but also hiked costs. He needed a stadium in Vero Beach to make money there but didn’t want to make the investment until he had a more stable relationship with the city.

In 1952 O’Malley and the city negotiated a 21-year lease for the property, with a Dodger right of renewal for a second such period.15 The rent was still $1 a year plus the proceeds of one exhibition game.  The  Dodgers’  president, a lawyer by training, plowed through two densely printed pages of the contract specifying what would happen if the Dodgers didn’t pay the rent. Then he peeled off $21 in cash and handed it to a Vero Beach official.16 The long-term lease gave O’Malley the confidence to invest $50,000 to build a stadium with just under 5,000 seats for spring training games.17 The stadium, named after Bud Holman, who had joined the Dodgers board of directors, opened in 1953. In building the stadium, the Dodgers had obtained dirt by hollowing out a nearby field. Afterwards, O’Malley filled it with water as a fishing hole and then, when a sulfurous smell appeared, named it Lake Gowanus after Brooklyn’s odiferous canal.18 Later in 1953, he added a pitch- and-putt golf course.19

But all wasn’t fishing and birdies. In 1951, Bavasi says, the mayor of Vero Beach came to him and complained about the growing number of African-American players on the Dodgers. Bavasi sent traveling secretary Lee Scott to the racetrack to bring back $20,000 in $2 bills. He then had his wife and Kay O’Malley stamp “Brooklyn Dodgers” on each $2 bill. He gave each Dodger staffer some of the money and told them to spend it in town over the weekend. The mayor called Monday morning to tell Bavasi he’d gotten the message.20 Still, as late as 1971, black Dodgers were complaining that if they wanted to play golf, eat at a restaurant, or go to a movie in town, they couldn’t.21 These complaints played a role in O’Malley’s decision to improve the food, add a movie theater, and eventually to add golf facilities at Dodgertown. It also led O’Malley to unilaterally take down the segregated seating signs at Holman Stadium in 1962.22

First, however, team and town had to survive the greatest threat to their relationship. It started in the late 1950s, as the new Federal Aviation Administration began to look into airports around the country. In Vero Beach, the FAA said, the city was violating the terms of the transfer of land from the federal government. Specifically, it was not making enough income from the land, and it was not using the money it did make purely for airport development and promotion.23  If the FAA’s complaints weren’t resolved, the federal agency could repossess the entire airport, including Dodgertown.

Over the five years the dispute took to resolve itself, the FAA was at pains to say it had no quarrel with the Dodgers.24 But it was saying to the city that the land leased to the Dodgers must generate more income. The figures varied a bit in the early years but eventually settled at $12,000 a year.25

Within the Vero Beach City Council, two schools of thought emerged. The Dodger supporters pointed to the economic benefits the team brought the city. They pointed to Dodger-related tourism, name recognition that helped broader tourism, and the team’s direct expenditures. They had no figures to support this, but the team regularly received votes of support from the chamber of commerce, tourism interests, and similar groups.26

Their opponents argued that the Dodgers were receiving 104 acres from the city that provided them with a wonderful training facility at next to no cost. The Dodgers, they said, should simply pay their fair share.27

The dispute became intimately involved in the politics of Vero Beach. The FAA’s action affected about 100 other tenants, including Holman, who actually ran the airport as a lessee (the Dodgers were his sublessee) and Piper Aircraft, which employed over 230 people at a factory on airport land.28 Piper was the biggest industrial enterprise in the city. Holman, after nearly 40 years of civic affairs, had his enemies. There were multiple lawsuits between the city, Holman, and individual city council members.29 There were whispers of fraud and missing money. “It was a bad time,” said Sig Lysne, a flying-school operator who sued Holman over the airport contract. Allegations flew that the Dodgers’ contract30 had never been approved by the Civil Aviation Administration (the FAA’s predecessor) and that a 21-year contract was illegal under the city charter.31

Walter O’Malley’s position remained consistent. The Dodgers had signed a legal contract with the city. The Dodgers had met every one of the conditions of the contract and, in fact, had invested some $3 million in developing Dodgertown over the dozen years they had been there.32 This, he noted, came with a return of only $122,000 from exhibition games. The Dodgers wanted to stay in Vero Beach and were happy to work with the city to resolve issues, but they weren’t willing to pay more rent.33 Other teams might pay rent for spring training facilities, but they didn’t have to pay to build those facilities, he said.

That didn’t stop people from approaching the Dodgers about moving, and O’Malley was only too happy to let that fact leak back to Florida to give him leverage in the Vero Beach discussions. The Dodgers looked at sites in California and considered other areas in Florida.34 Former Dodger outfielder Lee Walls tried to interest them in 2,000 acres near Palm Springs.35

In 1962, the issue apparently was solved when the city council agreed to make up the difference between the city’s spring training benefit game and the $12,000 minimum demanded by the FAA. But this wasn’t particularly satisfactory. For the city, a poor matchup or rain could ruin the take from their game. For the Dodgers, they knew that each year, a possibly different city council would have to approve making up the difference.36

The temporary solution was strong enough to hold until an idea that had been bandied about for nearly 20 years came to fruition. The idea of the Dodgers’ purchasing the Dodgertown land had surfaced as early as 1949. The idea hadn’t flown then because the Dodgers were offered a deal which cost them little cash at a time when O’Malley was pushing the board hard to conserve as much cash as possible to prepare to replace Ebbets Field.37 With the FAA problems, the idea had resurfaced but remained on the back burner.

With the tenuous city council resolution of 1962, the idea soon came to the fore.38 The negotiations dragged on through much of 1964 and into early 1965.39 Then the deal was struck. The Dodgers would buy 113 acres from the city. Some 13 acres of the original Dodgertown land, including the site of the first major league game played in Vero Beach, were to be turned over to an expansion-minded Piper Aircraft. The Dodgers would keep the core of the development and the city would add some additional property to the west. The price tag was $133,087.50.40

Title to the land gave O’Malley confidence to do make some considerable investments. A nine-hole golf course was begun on the new western property within four months of the sale.41 He entered into negotiations with the city that summer for an additional 180 acres northwest of Dodgertown.42 In 1971, that property would become the site of an 18-hole public golf course called Dodger Pines. It had eating facilities open to the public. The Dodgers eventually would own 413 acres in Vero Beach.43 Peter O’Malley and his sister, Therese Seidler, also would buy 54 acres in the area.

Landlord O’Malley also turned to the housing problem. When the Dodgers moved in, one of the attractions was the two two- story barracks erected at the airport for the pilots in training. The barracks could house 480 people, had facilities for feeding the men, and provided space for offices, lounges, and similar amenities. Although the buildings had looked good in 1947, they had been built to last out the war, not the centuries, and were beginning to look pretty shabby by the 1960s.

“The decor shows what can be done with plywood and a blank mind,” said Los Angeles Times sports columnist Jim Murray, “They tell me this place used to be a barracks for the Navy. Up till now, I didn’t know the Confederacy had a Navy.”44 Other commentators told of toilets that needed plungers and roofs that leaked.45 “A deluxe room came with two buckets, which filled quickly during tropical rainstorms,” said Los Angeles Herald Examiner sports columnist Melvin Durslag, “and the walls were so thin that one could lie awake and take his neighbor’s pulse.”46

In 1969 the Dodgers announced the barracks would be replaced by new housing units.47 In a burst of characteristic humor, O’Malley surreptitiously put up signs protesting the demolition of the barracks and calling for their return.48 With the six- or seven-team minor league systems of the 1960s, the organization didn’t need the same space as the 22-team systems of the late 1940s. The new housing was 90 units resembling rooms in a nicer motor court. They were completed in time for spring training 1972 and declared a “unanimous hit.”49

Over the next few decades, the Dodgers would invest further millions in the site, building conference rooms, weight rooms, a new clubhouse, tennis courts, a commercial laundry, a broadcasting studio, a new kitchen, and dining rooms. Housing would be built around the Dodger Pines Golf Course.50

Some of O’Malley’s investments were less successful. There was the “Dodger Cafeteria,” a restaurant featuring Southern-style cooking and housed in an eatery formerly known as “The Shed.” There was the papaya plantation that died in a winter freeze. There was the idea that the seeds of the Australian pines at Dodgertown were an exceptionally fine protein fertilizer for birds of paradise.51 The additional facilities were part of an attempt to turn Dodgertown into a year-round facility. The Dodger Conference Center opened in 1977, bringing in corporate groups for meetings where they easily could break for golf, tennis, swimming, or other recreation. The Dodgers put one of their minor-league clubs in the complex beginning in 1980. Fantasy camps, started in 1983, are run every year in November and February. National Football League clubs and major college programs have rented the facilities for training camp or to prepare for a big game.52

For nearly 30 years from the land purchase, the relationship between team and city went smoothly. By the late 1970s, the team was playing its entire home schedule at Holman stadium. Then came Fox.

When Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Television took over the Dodgers in 1998, the new management team looked at every facet of the organization. In Los Angeles, there was talk of dumping Dodger Stadium. In Florida, there was talk of dumping Vero Beach. An Indian tribe near Phoenix offered to build a $20 million (later escalating to $50 million) complex and lease it to the Dodgers at low prices. Vero Beach discussed the idea of buying Dodgertown from the team and leasing it back.53 Other cities surfaced, but were discarded.54

Vero Beach responded. The chamber of commerce put together a study that showed the Dodgers were worth millions every year to the Vero Beach economy. The local annual payroll was more than $4 million. Local purchases totaled $1.2 million while another $90,000 was donated to Indian River County charities. They noted that the O’Malley’s properties in the city contributed $320,000 in property taxes and $450,000 in state and local sales taxes. They suggested that the city’s growth from 3,000 people when the Dodgers arrived to almost 18,000 in 1998 was related to the image of the city as the spring home of the Dodgers.55

Within a few months, the tribe’s offer fell victim to financial questions. Their proposals weren’t as attractive as first described, and the Dodgers declined their final offer. Vero Beach’s special relationship survives, and with Dodger traditionalist Robert Daly running the team, the relationship seems stable, at least for now.

NOTES

1. Minutes, board meeting of the Brooklyn National League Baseball Club (hereafter board minutes), 10, 1947. Branch Rickey papers, Library of Congress.
2. Vero Beach Press-Journal, Nov. 7, 1947, p.1A.
3. The Sporting News, March 24, 1954, 5.
4. Interview, Harry “Bump” Holman, Vero Beach, Feb. 7, 2000.
5. See George Williams to Rickey, Feb. 6, 1947 in Rickey papers. Also, The Sporting News, Apr. 16, 1947, p. 11 and Aug. 20, 1947.
6. The Sporting News, 24, 1954, p. 5.
7. Holman interview, op. cit.
8. Interview, Buzzie Bavasi, La Jolla, CA, Aug. 30, 1994.
9. Vero Beach Press-Journal, Dec. 12, 1947, p. 1A and board minutes, Oct. 15, 1947.
10. President’s Report to the stockholders of the Brooklyn National League Baseball Club, Inc., Oct. 23, 1950, Rickey papers.
11. The Sporting News, Oct. 15, 1947, p. 13.
12. President’s Report, Oct. 23, 1950, op. cit. Rickey reports the Dodgers themselves, with the subsidy, made a profit of $40,000 for spring training. The Vero Beach operation, including some improvements, cost $176,000. Since some other clubs trained outside Vero Beach, the organization’s net spring training loss was $168,000.

13. Lacy, Sam with Moses Newson. Fighting for Fairness. Centreville, Md: Tidewater Publishers, 1998, p. 67.
14. Bavasi interview, op. cit.
15. Vero Beach Press-Journal, Jan. 31, 1952, p. 1A.
16. The Sporting News, March 12, 1952, 9.
17. Dan Parker, New York Daily Mirror, March 14, 1953.
18. The Sporting News, Feb. 4, 1953, p. 6 and March 18, 1953, p. 17.
19. The Sporting News, Nov. 4, 1953, p. 9.
20. Bavasi interview, op. cit. Larry Reisman, editor of the Vero Beach Press-Journal told me (Jan. 11, 2000) that Bavasi had told him the same story. There was no mention of the incident in the paper at the time, and Reisman said he spent some time with older residents trying to pin the story down. He said he never found direct confirmation but came to trust Bavasi’s memory on the incident.
21. Roseboro, John with Bill Glory Days with the Dodgers. New York: Atheneum, 1978, pp. 110-114. See also Melvin Durlsag column, Los Angeles Examiner, Feb. 19, 1961, Pt. 6, p. 1 or The Sporting News, March 20, 1971, p. 46.
22. The Sporting News, April 11, 1962, 18.
23. Los Angeles Times, June 17, 1960, IV, p. 3. Vero Beach Press-Journal, June 23, 1960, pps. 1A and 2A, and Nov. 17, 1960, p. 1A.
24. Vero Beach Press-Journal, April 6, 1961, 5B.
25. Vero Beach Press-Journal, Feb. 23, 1961, p. 1A. The $12,000 was the bottom range of a spread (to $15,000) suggested by the FAA, but quickly became the standard in further Vero Beach Press-Journal, Sept. 11, 1960, p. 1A shows figures as high as $30,000.
26. Vero Beach Press-Journal, June 22, 1961, p. 1 A and 5A; Sept. 11, 1960, p. 1A, March 2, 1961, 1A. Los Angeles Herald Examiner, March 10, 1963, p. E4.
27. Vero Beach Press-Journal, April 13, 1961, 7B.
28. Vero Beach Press-Journal, Sept. 11, 1960, p. 1A.
29. Vero Beach Press-Journal, Nov. 3, 1960, p. 1A. Vero Beach Press-Journal, June 29, 1961, 1A, March 1, 1962, p. 2A, Vero Beach Press-Journal, May 17, 1962, p. 1A, Aug. 11, 1960, p. 1A, March 23, 1961, p. 1A, April 13, 1961, p. 1A.
30. Vero Beach Press-Journal, Dodger Spring Training 50th Anniversary Edition, February 1998, 7.
31. Vero Beach Press-Journal, April 13, 1961, p. 7B. Over time, the violation of the city charter seemed to be an accepted fact, but the Dodgers vehemently denied their contract was not approved and provided documents to newspapers that seemed to back their case. Their opponents and the FAA, however, offered other Since the contract never went to court, there was never a resolution of this issue.
32. Fresco Thompson to Vero Beach Press-Journal, July 7, 1960, 7A.
33. Vero Beach Press-Journal, March 2, 1961, 1A.
34. Los Angeles Examiner, Feb. 27, 1961, Pt. 4, p. 2, Sept. 21, 1961, Pt. 4, p. 2 and Nov. 20, 1961, Pt. 4, p. 2. Also, The Sporting News, July 27, 1960, p. 15.
35. Los Angeles Herald Examiner, April 8, 1963, Pt. C, p. 3.
36. Vero Beach Press-Journal, April 26, 1962, 1A, May 10, 1962, p. 7C.
37. Board minutes, March 7, 1949, Rickey papers. O’Malley’s running concern with replacing Ebbets Field is apparent through the minutes from 1946 to When the Dodgers were faced with replacing the stadium in Ft. Worth after a May 1949 fire, his comments were particularly pointed.
38. Vero Beach Press-Journal, Feb. 9, 1961, p. 1A, Nov.9, 1961, p. 1A and April 4, 1963, 1A. Also, The Sporting News, March 30, 1963.
39. Vero Beach Press-Journal, Feb. 20, 1964, p. 1A, June 18, 1964, p. 1A., June 18, 1964, p. 1A.
40. Vero Beach Press-Journal, March 18, 1965, 1A.
41. Vero Beach Press-Journal, July 8, 1965, 1A.
42. Vero Beach Press-Journal, July 29, 1965, 1C.
43. Vero Beach Press-Journal, 50th Anniversary Spring Training Edition, February 1998, op. cit.
44. Los Angeles Times, March 28, 1962, Pt. III, p. 1.
45. Los Angeles Herald Examiner, March 8, 1963, Cl.
46. The Sporting News, March 18, 1972, 36.
47. Los Angeles Herald Examiner, March 8, 1969, B2.
48. The Sporting News, April 19, 1969, 10.
49. The Sporting News, March 18, 1972, 36.
50. Los Angeles Dodgers 1999 Media Guide, 94.
51. The Sporting News, March 22, 1969, 2.
52. Dodgers 1999 Media Guide, op. cit.
53. The Associated Press, Nov. 10, 1998, Los Angeles Times, March 31, 1999, p. D1.
54. Press-Enterprise, Riverside, Calif., Jan. 30, 1999.
55. Vero Beach Press-Journal, 50th Anniversary Spring Training Edition, February 1998, op. cit., p. 22.