INFECTIOUS GROOVES COLUMNIST'S RETURN TO DODGERTOWN BRINGS BACK MEMORIES OF ITS CHARM -- AND POX.

Byline: KEVIN MODESTI

VERO BEACH, Fla. - An old Dodgers writer goes back to Dodgertown this week, maybe for the last time, basking in happy memories. Such as the chicken pox.

I was 24 the year I was thrown onto the baseball beat and packed off to Vero Beach in the middle of spring training, desperate to look like I belonged with the press room's famous veteran stars. This got harder a week later, when I came down with a children's disease and broke out in pimples.

Everything about the chicken-pox episode reminds me how homey the camp felt back then amid the serious business of cutoff drills and reporting on cutoff drills.

At first I thought the pimples were from mosquito bites. I'd slept with the patio door open in a room next to the Dodgertown pool. Once it dawned on me there weren't enough bugs in all of Florida to do this much damage, I went to the Dodgertown nurse's station and joined the minor-leaguers in line for a blood-pressure check.

The nurse took one look at me and called in Dr. Frank Jobe, who took one look at me and realized this wasn't his area of specialty. Jobe phoned another doctor, a prominent physician from Minnesota who was a Dodgertown guest of Peter O'Malley. The second doctor took one look at me and knew what was wrong, noting my "necrotized pustules" (medical talk for dead zits).

It's the only case of chicken pox ever to be diagnosed by sports' most celebrated orthopedic surgeon and a doctor from the Mayo Clinic -- without a bill.

Two results of all this:

The Dodgers politely requested that I stay out of the Dodgertown cafeteria to avoid infecting anybody important. For a few days there, I gladly had supper delivered to my room.

The other writers fixed me with the nickname "Pox," which lingered long after the blemishes cleared up. To this day, I'm Pox to some of those guys -- especially Bags, Beast, Mouse, One a Day and Pig.

"Modesti doesn't seem to like 'Pox,'" somebody told the South Bay Daily Breeze's Terry Johnson (The Reverend, when he wasn't The Assassin) when we got back to LosAngeles.

"Maybe he'd prefer 'A------,'" Johnson replied.

You're going to read a lot of Vero Beach nostalgia over the next couple of years as the Dodgers prepare to leave their spring-training home of more than a half-century for a more practical spot near Phoenix. The Hall of Famers, the high jinx, the incredible openness of the camp to fans -- most sweetly the Brooklynites who still came down to see their Dodgers in the sunshine for decades after the club left NewYork.

It's just that, nostalgia.

Because most of what we're going to miss has been missing for years, and not just here but everywhere that professional athletes' relationship with the public and press (the two are directly linked) has grown more formal and wary.

My first time in Dodgertown, reporters still roomed on-site, next door to players and executives, and we worked in a press room mere steps away from the bar and card tables, with a panoramic view of the practice diamonds. Now reporters live in rented condos and file from a bunker impregnable by cell-phone signals.

I spent a few springs in Vero and took away a few memories. Some of them are even my own. A few are printable.

I think of Vero, and I think of the two L.A. writers in the '70s who found themselves walking in Dodgertown before dawn, either up early or getting home late. Through the mist, they heard a crack, crack, crack.

They followed the sound to the batting cages next to Holman Stadium.

There, alone with a pitching machine, Dick Allen was working his way out of a Grapefruit League slump.

I think of Vero, and I think of the L.A. writer a few years later who promised his editor aquestion-and-answer with the elusive Sandy Koufax, got 45golden minutes with the Hall of Famer as they sat in a golf cart in a practice-field outfield -- then felt his heart sink when he realized he'd missed the "record" button on his tape machine.

Koufax's reaction to this waste of time? "Let's do it again," Sandy said, and they did. Ever after, he would call that writer "Young Tom Edison."

I think of Vero, and I think of watching Koufax throw 90 mph batting practice 20 years after his retirement. I think of a writers-vs.-coaches basketball game in which we found out how sharp Tom Lasorda's elbows were and how competitive Fred Claire was. And I think of Bob Hunter, the Hall of Fame writer of the Herald-Examiner and Daily News, introducing me to Lasorda as he and the great L.A. sports journalist Bud Furillo sat in the Dodgertown bar.

" 'Modesti'! Is that Italian?" Lasorda said hopefully.

"Actually, that part of my family was Corsican," I said in a Woody Allen hem-and-haw -- and there went my first, best chance to get in good with the manager.

Just so you don't get the idea this is all about the spring-training lives of sportswriters -- we know you don't give a hoot about our joys and heartaches -- the end of scenes like those above coincided with the end of scenes like the one below.

Those who were there still talk about the day Dodgers Darryl Strawberry and Eric Davis, two of the biggest names in baseball at the time, started signing autographs in front of the clubhouse and didn't stop until they'd exhausted a line of fans (as somebody described it the other day) a mile long.

You don't see that anymore. The Dodgertown layout has changed, players have changed, fans have changed.

But the place still has charms you find in no other spring-training camp.

It has the ghosts of 60 uninterrupted years with one ballclub, it has those memories.

There's something infectious about it. And unlike the first time here, that something isn't me.

heymodesti(AT_SIGN)aol.com

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CAPTION(S):

3 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color) Street signs bearing the names of pitcher Don Drysdale and broadcaster Vin Scully mark paths at Dodgertown in Vero Beach, Fla.

(2 -- color) The Dodgers are staging their 60th season of spring training at Dodgertown.

(3 -- color) The Dodgers plan to move their spring-training operations to Glendale, Ariz., in 2009.

Richard Drew/Associated Press