Valentine remembers Lasorda, his close friend and coach
The first professional team Bobby Valentine played for was a Dodgers affiliate in Ogden, Utah where Tommy Lasorda was the manager.
Valentine remembered Lasorda, his former coach and longtime friend, Friday afternoon.
“It is a sad day but a day that has been coming for a while. Tommy dodged death the last seven years. I flew out to California to say goodbye to him four times and today I am flying out again to say goodbye one last time,” Valentine said. “He was the most amazing person I have ever been around. He was an amazing person in that he did more of everything. He stayed up later than anyone else, he ate more than anyone else, he told more stories than everybody else and he gave more signs than anyone else… The bite he took out of the apple of life was a big bite.”
Lasorda, the fiery Hall of Fame manager who guided the Los Angeles Dodgers to two World Series titles and later became an ambassador for the sport he loved during his 71 years with the franchise, died at 93 Thursday.
Though Lasorda was Valentine’s first professional manager, the two had met several years before while Valentine was on a recruiting trip to USC where Lasorda happened to be scouting some players.
“The first time I met him, he gave me a transistor radio at a college game at USC,” Valentine said. “He tapped me on the shoulder and said ‘I heard you are a
pretty good ballplayer from Connecticut. Why don’t you take this as a little gift from me but not say where you got it.’ It was a transistor radio and it said Dodgers across the front.”
Valentine would sign a major league contract with the Dodgers three weeks later and when he went to rookie camp in Utah, who did he find waiting for him off the plane but Lasorda.
Lasorda would provide Valentine with wisdom he said he still carries with him to this day.
“Something I tell all my coaches at my academy and that I believe to be true is ‘no players care what you know, until they know that you care,’ ” Valentine said. “Tommy first and foremost wanted his players to understand that he cared.”
The Dodgers said Friday that Lasorda had a heart attack at his home in Fullerton, Calif. Resuscitation attempts were made on the way to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead shortly before 11 p.m. Thursday.
Lasorda had a history of heart problems, including a heart attack in 1996 that ended his managerial career and another in 2012 that required him to have a pacemaker.
He had just returned home Tuesday after being hospitalized since Nov. 8 with heart issues.
Lasorda attended the Dodgers’ Game 6 victory over the Tampa Bay Rays on Oct. 27 in Texas that clinched the team’s first World Series title since 1988. He had served in the role of special adviser to team owner and chairman Mark Walter for the last 14 years, and maintained a frequent presence at games sitting in Walter's box.
Valentine said that trip to the World Series with Lasorda will remain one of the most memorable trips of his life.
“We didn’t know if it
would happen. His doctors didn’t let him come out to Game 1 or Game 2. Then the Dodgers lost a game and there was an off day and we had a private plane ready, we made sure the suite was safe and everyone was tested beforehand. His wife finally said it was OK to do it,” Valentine said. “It was an amazing situation. Not only that he could be there for Game 6 but Eric Karros, one of his players, and Rick Honeycutt, one of his players, were there with him. I don’t know how that chapter could have been written any better. Then the Dodgers did what they needed to do. They got Tommy to stand up on his own when the last out was made and put his hands up over his head and say ‘we did it.’ It was very special.”
Lasorda worked as a player, scout, manager and front office executive with the Dodgers dating to their roots in Brooklyn.
He compiled a 1,599-1,439 record, won World Series titles in 1981 and ’88, four National League pennants and eight division titles
while serving as Dodgers manager from 1977-96.
He was elected to baseball’s Hall of Fame in 1997 as a manager. He guided the U.S. to a baseball gold medal at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
Lasorda was the franchise’s longest-tenured active employee since Hall of Fame broadcaster Vin Scully retired in 2016 after 67 years. He drew standing ovations when introduced at games in recent years.
He often proclaimed, “I bleed Dodger blue” and he kept a bronze plaque on his desk reading: “Dodger Stadium was his address, but every ballpark was his home.”
As a pitcher, Lasorda had a modest career at the major league level, going 0-4 with a 6.48 ERA and 13 strikeouts from 1954-56.
Born Thomas Charles Lasorda on Sept. 22, 1927, in Norristown, Pennsylvania, his pro career began when he signed with the Philadelphia Phillies as an undrafted free agent in 1945. He missed the 1946 and ’47 seasons while serving in
the Army.
Lasorda returned in 1948 and once struck out 25 players in a 15-inning game. In his next two starts, he struck out 15 and 13, gaining the attention of the Dodgers, who drafted him from the Phillies. He played in Panama and Cuba before making his major league debut on Aug. 5, 1954, for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Although he didn’t play in the 1955 World Series, he won a ring as a member of the team.
Lasorda stayed on with the Dodgers as a scout after they released him in 1960. That was the beginning of a steady climb through the Dodgers’ system that culminated in his 1973 promotion to the big-league staff under longtime Hall of Fame manager Walter Alston.
Lasorda spent four seasons as third base coach while considered to be the heir apparent to Alston, who retired in September 1976.