It’s 12:05 on a Wednesday afternoon in March. An eighth-grade form of Jake Krempel is sitting in class with his eyes glued to the clock. Mom is five minutes late! Suddenly, the intercom system breaks my anguish. “Mrs. Marshall, please send Jacob to the office. His mother is here to pick him up.” Freedom! I run out of the classroom down to the office of St. Helen Catholic School. My mom signs me out and I race to the car, changing out of my school uniform into my Braves jersey on the way.
    This was the only time of the year I was allowed to cut school. It was spring training in my hometown of Vero Beach. Most likely my Atlanta Braves were in town that day, and my grandfather had made the drive down to watch our favorite team play. We were off to the real field of dreams: Vero Beach’s Dodgertown.
    Dodgertown was one of a kind. An Air Force base until 1955, Dodger ownership bought the place and made it the first ever spring training center in Florida. The army-style barracks were where the players used to stay. That was, of course, until the superstars got super rich and rented houses on the beach, leaving the minor leaguers and no-names to “rough it” there.
    Amazingly, the dugouts had no roofs, allowing players and fans to interact during the whole game. Fans in the first row could touch the players, they were so close! The outfield fence was chain-link, and the berm beyond the fence was open for you to sit on, making it easy to heckle your least favorite outfielders as you fought for home-run balls. Gary Sheffield, Manny Ramirez, Barry Bonds, no one was safe from the fans on the left-field berm. Best of all for us pre-teen little leaguers was the opportunity for autographs. After the stars would get pulled from the game, you could line the first base line as they left; begging for them to stop and give you a signature on your cap, baseball, shirt, or any body part or object you could get in their way. It was the best stadium in sports for autographs. My millions of autographed baseballs can prove that point.
    It was a place full of history. The streets are named after famous Dodgers: Jackie Robinson Way, Don Sutton Avenue, Sandy Kofaux Road, and those same hall of famers would be in the streets of Vero every spring. Tommy Lasorda and Mike Piazza would be at Mass while I was altar serving. My parents would go out to dinner and see hall of famers and pro players at every table. Sandy Kofaux owns a house in Vero, and so did so many other Dodgers. They made the city come alive, and made the dreams of every kid come true. For three months out of the year, baseball legends were walking, shopping and talking among us.
    We should have seen the end coming. This dream lifestyle couldn’t last forever, and year after year the Dodgers threatened to leave, and our city council did everything they could to make them want to leave. The Brooklyn Dodger-era fans were dying out, and those yuppies from the West Coast didn’t want to make the trip to some hick town in Florida to see their team play. Attendance was slowly dwindling, and when the team was sold from family ownership to the Fox News conglomerate, we knew it would only be a matter of time. Money, greed and hurt pride over took sanity on both sides. A new stadium was built in Arizona, and our city council let them walk into the desert sunset.
    Dodgertown is no more. This is the first year since 1955 that the Dodgers aren’t spending their spring in Vero Beach. Our city politicians promised us a new team, a better team, one that would “support the community”. Any team with smart ownership would want to move to historic Dodgertown, they said. Hope sprung eternal, and sure enough, the teams started to call.
    We spurned the Red Sox because some politico decided his buddies in the Dodger organization shouldn’t have a deadline to move out of Vero. With no guarantee that they could move in before this spring season, the Red Sox organization (and their fifty million die-hard fans) signed a long-term lease with Fort Meyers. That pretty much scared away the rest of Major League Baseball. The Baltimore Oriels will possibly move to Vero in the next year or two, but since the city council dragged their feet on a contract, Dodgertown will stand empty for at least this spring.
    It’s a sad story to say the least. I can’t seem to shake this melancholy feeling every time a baseball report pops up on ESPN. I feel for my hometown. Even if the Orioles move in, it will never be the same. Cal Ripken Jr. doesn’t equal the history of the Dodger organization. Dodger blue was engrained into our town, our minds, and our hearts. While I’m a Braves fan first, like every person from Vero Beach I still pull for the Dodgers. We could never fully open up to a mediocre organization like Baltimore. What the politicians forgot while they played the blame game was that the Dodgers made Vero Beach the paradise that it is. Pushing them away will kill our city’s economy, our civic pride and hopefully their political careers. Worst of all, the best spring training complex in the world is left empty for the first time in almost 55 years. I can’t help but feel for the eight-grader sitting in Mrs. Marshall’s class this spring, never getting a chance to go to a Dodger game, rub shoulders with the greatest in baseball history, and fall in love with the real life field of dreams.