Tommy Lasorda was born on the first day of autumn, the most important season in baseball. Many years later, he made a lasting fall impression, but on that day, in 1927, the Brooklyn Dodgers lost a double header. Lasorda, from Norristown, Pa., Would become a scrappy left-handed pitcher for the team, but he would also never win for them.
Like Walter Alston, his predecessor as manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Lasorda only briefly appeared as a major league player. Alston was undefeated in a bat; Lasorda was starting to win in a handful. Yet they managed the team in a continuous line from 1954 to 1996, combining all six of the franchise championships before 2020.
“Their strength was the strength of the Dodgers: they knew the smaller league system, they knew how players should be major leagues, they understood the importance of scouts and player development – they knew it from the ground up,” Fred said. Claire, the former Dodgers general manager, said Thursday. “Their personalities were different, but their foundations were almost identical.”
Until Lasorda’s death on Wednesday, 93 years old, at home, he was the senior member of the Baseball Hall of Fame. If there really is a Dodger blue sky, as he always claimed, he can look down on the world and see his old team on top. He was watching from a ballpark suite in Arlington, Texas, when the Dodgers won the World Series last October.
“I think he should have been there, you know?” Bobby Valentine said Thursday. “Just like he had to come out of the hospital to be with his wife, she could say it’s OK.”
Valentine, the longtime Premier League manager, was with Lasorda at Globe Life Field; a mutual friend, Warren Lichtenstein, arranged for Lasorda to take a private plane to Texas, with a doctor at all times.
‘He did not stand – we sent him in, and he sat all the time – but with one out or maybe two out in the last innings, he stood and he saw the match stand, and when they won, he threw both hands above his head and said, “Oh yes!” said Valentine. “That ‘Oh yeah,’ to everyone who’s ever been around him, that’s what he said when he ran out of the dugout after they won, ‘Oh yeah, we did it!'”
Lasorda’s teams have won 1,630 matches in the major leagues, including the national season. He led the Dodgers to seven division titles, four World Series appearances and two championships, in 1981 and 1988. Upon his retirement, he won the U.S. baseball team – mostly minor players – at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
With Lasorda, however, the games were only part of the story. He was a sincere celebrity, a friend of Frank Sinatra and Don Rickles who always knew where to get a camera. He could share wisdom as a flashy magician in a children’s TV show (‘The Baseball Bunch’) or utter an ominous joke about a reporter who dared to ask his opinion on the actions of a competitor . Jon Lovitz played him on ‘Saturday Night Live’.
Lasorda had something about mascots. In 1989, he ordered the referees to oust Youppi! – a cheerful orange spot in a Montreal Expos jersey – to chatter loudly on top of the Dodgers excavation. A year earlier, he had wrestled the Phillie Phanatic on the grass field at Veterans Stadium and beaten him with a stuffed Dodgers dummy.
Lasorda and the Phanatic, played by Dave Raymond at the time, formed an act on a benevolent trip to Major League Baseball in Japan in 1979. But Lasorda broke up in Philadelphia that day and an all-time highlight was born.
“All the other times I interacted with him, he really did it with his tongue in cheek, but I knew he was crazy because he used my name and tied some explicit,” Raymond said. Said Thursday. ‘I was quite confused – “I think he’s really angry!” – and when my head almost came down, I was really angry. The next few turns I had the dummy on the Phillies excavation and I gave it pizza. At that point, I said, ‘OK, you started it.’ ‘
Years later, when Lasorda spotted a Raymond outside the costume in a hotel portal at baseball’s winter events, he enchanted friends with a summary of their fighting. It was all part of the show with Lasorda, which Raymond would always ask about his father, Tubby, the longtime football coach at the University of Delaware.
“The biggest sadness – outside of his family and his good friends and the Dodger family – is for baseball, because Tommy was the best ambassador,” Raymond said. ‘We no longer have people like Tommy Lasorda or Earl Weaver or Tug McGraw or Jay Johnstone. It seems like these types of people are being eliminated. With travel sports and the emphasis on performance and analysis, and so on, we lose some of the best parts of baseball, some of the things we would tackle as children. There was this amazing window frame that gave personalities like Tommy to the game. ”
Valentine – herself a colorful character – agrees with the idea, but emphasizes Lasorda’s role as a visionary person looking far beyond the hills with Dodger Stadium. He has held clinics around the world, taught Spanish and forwards such as Fernando Valenzuela, one of baseball’s first stars from Mexico, and Hideo Nomo, the first MLB All-Star from Japan.
For Valentine, Lasorda follows in the footsteps of Branch Rickey, the Hall of Fame executive for the Dodgers and other teams that brought Jackie Robinson to the majors and created a blueprint for the modern farming system.
“Tommy wore the stick to do things differently,” Valentine said. “He was an old Italian who had old Italian manners, but somehow, with a high school education, he knew that the world was changing and that baseball had to change with it.”
Lasorda’s deepest legacy is perhaps the way he changed the role of manager. Alston could be distant and silent, but Lasorda was a shameless cheerleader for his players, creating an environment where young players thrived, and could motivate players as little as possible.
The 1988 World Series, against the imposing Oakland Athletics, was Lasorda’s masterpiece. The Dodgers stole Game 1 on Kirk Gibson’s enchanting homer, and pitcher Orel Hershiser dominated the A’s twice. But their other win, in Game 4, was all Lasorda, whose patchwork composition had fewer homers than Jose Canseco of Oakland had alone.
In the NBC preseason, Bob Costas praised the Dodgers pitching, but called their team ‘one of the weakest ever to win the field for a World Series match’. Lasorda, looking into the clubhouse, rattled the walls with a barrage of grievances.
‘Do you hear what Costas said? He said you are the worst attacking team ever!Says Mickey Hatcher, the super-sub-bat third, and recalls Lasorda’s tirade recently. ‘Oh man, he raised it. And of course, when we were in the dugout, the players were screaming and Costas did not know what was there. But Tommy kept feeding them all. ‘
Costas ended the pre-match from his spot at the first base of the grass, at the corner of the visitors. He stayed on the field for the national anthem, without Lasorda seeing his analysis, which even made use of the Dodgers.
“I’m standing next to Hershiser, who is standing at the end of the line with his cap over his heart during the national anthem,” Costas said recently. And he looks down over his shoulder and out of the corner of his mouth he goes, ‘Boy, Tommy really let the guys go what you said. “And I’m scared, like, ‘What is he talking about?’
‘Then they won, and Lasorda made a big deal about it on TV with Marv Albert. And he winks at me all the time! ‘
The Dodgers ran the base with dedication that night and scratched runs on a successful ball, a foul and two ground strokes. They won the title one game later, and when they finally regained it, their biggest fan was finally there.
“What Tommy was talking about, more than anything, was his passion and love for the game,” Claire said. “That’s what drove him, that’s what enabled him to play professional baseball initially, that’s what he had as a youngster, and that’s what he never lost.”