Dodger fans: Taking heat in the desert

By Steve Stockmar
Twitter: @stevestockmar

The Diamondbacks are the Valley of the Sun’s undisputed hometown team, with a large and loyal red sea of support to prove it. Yet the fan base of their biggest rival, the Los Angeles Dodgers, can give them the blues, especially on their home turf.

Let’s face it -- if Dodgers fans and Diamondbacks fans in the Valley had a relationship status, it would be “complicated.”

Their history doesn’t go back all that far in baseball terms. And Dodger fans famously have plenty of beefs against the San Francisco Giants. And every other NL West team also calls the Valley home during spring training, including the Colorado Rockies who actually share a spring home stadium with the D-backs at Salt River Fields at Talking Stick in Scottsdale.

Still, there’s something unique about the sight of that Dodger swag walking by in the dusty desert that brings the heat.

“Just the typical,” Dodger diehard -- and Glendale resident -- Steve Lopez said what he hears when a D-back fan spots his true blue. “Somebody walks by you and you hear ‘Pfffft ... go back to L.A.’”

His response?

“Who won the World Series this year?”

With the Dodgers winning the championship in 2020, fans get those bragging rights when Major League Baseball players begin reporting to the Valley for spring training next week, including at the Dodgers’ preseason home at Camelback Ranch-Glendale. The league laid out COVID-19 health and safety protocols this week, and spring training games are tentatively scheduled to begin on time.

“Each of the Cactus League’s eight host municipalities and the tribal community participated in a task force to ensure that our 10 spring training facilities will provide a safe environment for all involved,” the Cactus League posted to social media on Feb. 5. “Operating procedures are forthcoming and will depend entirely on health guidelines.”

Another Glendale resident, Michele Chenoweth, is a Dodger diehard who knows all about being surrounded by a rival fan base. She grew up in the Bay Area -- Giants country -- where she lived for 34 years.

“Growing up in the Bay Area as a Dodger fan was brutal,” she said.

Her third-grade softball team was called the Dodgers, and something about the way her Giant-diehard parents got “mad” because that made them root for a team called the “Dodgers” was just enough fun for her to stick with the real Dodgers from that point on.

“This is gonna be my new favorite team,” she remembered thinking. “The Giants are just evil.”

Another Valley resident, Randy Arellano, goes back even further with his Dodgers fandom. The Southern California native was born in 1958 -- the same year the Dodgers played their first game in L.A. after relocating from Brooklyn.

He was born into a Dodger family, and went to a Sunday doubleheader at age 7 where Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax pitched both ends.

“I had no choice but to be a Dodger fan,” he said Feb. 9, sporting a classic Koufax jersey outside of Camelback Ranch-Glendale. “Not the Angels or anybody else. It’s the Dodgers.”

Meanwhile, the Dodgers ironically helped influence Mr. Lopez, who was born and raised in L.A., to move to the Valley 11 years ago.

He had two job offers on the table -- one in the Valley and the other in Boston. Since his beloved Dodgers had left their longtime spring training home of Vero Beach, Florida, to set up shop at Camelback Ranch-Glendale in 2009, his mind was made up.

“That was just ... destiny, I guess,” said Mr. Lopez, who lives less than a mile from the stadium. “I knew where I was gonna live.”

Mr. Lopez, who went to his first game at Dodger Stadium with his dad in the late ’70s, attends every Dodgers game at Chase Field during the regular season, and many road games as well.

The rivalry with local Diamondbacks fans, says Ms. Chenoweth, has been a slow burn over the years. From the time the D-backs debuted in 1998, the Dodgers had won only one NL West crown through 2007, while the D-backs won four. By 2013 the tide had really turned, as the Dodgers won eight straight (and counting) division titles, including three NL pennants and last season’s World Series.

“That’s when it started heating up,” she says. “Right around the time the Dodgers started winning their division.”

She had arrived in the Valley in 2002 -- the year after the Diamondbacks won the World Series -- and she’s had plenty of time to analyze the heat from D-back Nation as compared to the Giants’ fan base she grew up with.

“Diamondbacks fans are more verbally loud, I guess, and vocal as far as Dodger fans go. Giants fans are more physical,” she said. “As a little girl I had beer thrown on me, I had food thrown at me. And it got to the point where my dad would not allow me to wear any Dodger stuff out at Candlestick Park or out in public. Just because the hate. It’s more like the Giants fans - there’s more hate, and the Diamondbacks fans it’s more jealousy.”

She has zero apprehension about flying her Dodger blue around town in the Valley.

“To tell you the truth,” she says, “I see more people in Dodgers stuff here than I do Diamondbacks.”

Mr. Arellano, too, has settled into the Valley, since making a work-related relocation here in 1997.

“I eventually fell in love with Arizona,” he says. “Arizona is home.”

Destiny smiled on him as well, when his beloved team also relocated to the Valley for spring.

“I was ecstatic! It was a dream come true,” he said, remembering vividly when the area that now houses Camelback Ranch was a cotton field in what was then distant-west Glendale.

Camelback Ranch-Glendale, which was built for $100 million, became the largest spring training stadium to ever open when it debuted on March 1, 2009.

Ms. Chenoweth was there the first day.

“I just felt like I was at home. I looked at my husband and said, ‘I’m with all my people.’ I had never been around that many Dodger fans before, because obviously in the Bay Area,” she said. “It was like a whole different experience. It was like heaven.”

Steve Stockmar
News Editor | Sun Life Magazine & Arts & Entertainment YourValley.net
@stevestockmar

sstockmar@iniusa.org

Meet Steve
Steve Stockmar joined Independent Newsmedia, Inc., USA, in 2017, and has been an Arizona journalist for almost 30 years. He serves as editor of Sun Life Magazine and contributes to West Valley communities where he focuses mostly on arts & culture, education, and profiles of neighbors making a difference.

Community: Every season Steve serves as a “buddy” with the Miracle League of Arizona in Scottsdale, has volunteered his time with Family Promise in Glendale, and previously served on the Ghostlight Theatre board in Sun City West.

Education: Graduated from Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff with a Journalism major and English minor.

Random Fact: Steve once won a 50-player live Texas Hold ’Em poker tournament.

Hobbies: Anguishing over his beloved Chicago Cubs and Bears; listening to Beatles and Grateful Dead music.