Boys Of Summer Will Miss Dodgertown

The Boys of Summer sat in front of their lockers Friday morning, slowly buttoning up their white Dodgers home uniforms for the last time.

They’re all in their early 80s now. But Duke Snider, Carl Erskine and Ralph Branca will never grow old for generations of baseball fans who followed their exploits as the scrappy Brooklyn Dodgers of the early to mid-1950s.

The Boys of Summer.

Their arms may be shot, and their legs and power long gone, but there’s nothing wrong with their minds. They’re sharp as tacks.

As they dressed for the last day of Dodgertown fantasy baseball camp in Vero Beach, Fla., they talked about what this place – an old Navy base that Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley converted to a sprawling spring-training ground in 1948 – has meant to them.

How it’s going to be sad to leave these old baseball fields, bunkhouses and locker rooms where they began their careers 60 years ago as young men and rose to the top of the baseball world.

Next season, the Dodgers will move their spring-training facility closer to Los Angeles in Glendale, Ariz.

But that’s next year. Friday, they took one last walk around Dodgertown with me to relive old memories that will never die.

Erskine stood on the same mound where Branch Rickey, the legendary Dodgers general manager who brought Jackie Robinson up from the minors and integrated major league baseball, watched him pitch with an eagle eye.

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