BASEBALL LEGEND TOMMY LASORDA DIES AT 93 YEARS OLD
LOS ANGELES — Tom Lasorda, who in 20 years as the Los Angeles Dodgers manager won two World Series championships, four National League pennants and eight division titles and always insisted that he bled Dodger blue out of loyalty to the organization, has died at age 93.
The vibrant and voluble Lasorda spent 71 seasons with the Dodgers and was among the few remaining links to the club’s Brooklyn roots. In and out of the hospital in recent years for heart, back and shoulder problems, Lasorda died of a heart attack Thursday night, according to the Dodgers.
A friend to presidents and Little Leaguers, a devout Catholic with a talent for rapid-fire profanity, a self-promoter who tirelessly raised funds for convents and disaster victims through banquets and speeches, Lasorda spanned several eras in baseball and — along with Vin Scully and Sandy Koufax — achieved near-mythical status among loyal Dodger fans.
“My family, my partners and I were blessed to have spent a lot of time with Tommy,” said Mark Walter, Dodgers owner and chairman. “He was a great ambassador for the team and baseball, a mentor to players and coaches, he always had time for an autograph and a story for his many fans and he was a good friend. He will be dearly missed.”
“In a franchise that has celebrated such great legends of the game, no one who wore the uniform embodied the Dodger spirit as much as Tommy Lasorda,” Dodger president and CEO Stan Kasten said. “A tireless spokesman for baseball, his dedication to the sport and the team he loved was unmatched. He was a champion who at critical moments seemingly willed his teams to victory. The Dodgers and their fans will miss him terribly. Tommy is quite simply irreplaceable and unforgettable.”
He was voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame by the veterans committee in 1997, his first year of eligibility, and the Dodgers later retired his uniform number, 2. Four years after he retired as a major league manager, he guided the lightly regarded U.S. Olympic baseball team to a gold medal at the 2000 Sydney Games. He retained the title of special adviser to the Dodgers’ chairman, most recently reporting directly to controlling owner Mark Walter. His last known public appearance was at Game 6 of the 2020 World Series in Arlington, Texas, where he saw the team he guided for so many years finally win another title.
As a player, Lasorda was a fearless but unpolished left-handed pitcher who was demoted to the minor leagues when the Dodgers needed to open a roster spot for a promising kid named Sandy Koufax. Lasorda compiled an 0-4 record over parts of three seasons with the Brooklyn Dodgers and Kansas City Athletics and spent 14 seasons in the minor leagues before he began working his way up the ladder of the Dodger organization as a manager.
Lasorda ate with the same gusto that he managed, earning the nickname “Tommy Lasagna.” Although he famously became a pitchman for a weight-loss aid and shed 40 pounds on a dare in 1988, he was instantly recognizable for his rotund figure and the sagging pouches under his eyes.
Despite his 1,599 victories and the Dodgers’ World Series titles in 1981 and 1988, Lasorda was never considered a great innovator or tactician. But he had an unerring gut sense of how to manage players, and was, unquestionably, a great motivator. And through seven decades as a player, scout, coach, manager, interim general manager and adviser, he remained an unabashed cheerleader for the Dodgers.
“No one knows how good a manager he is — it’s an imprecise science — but he was good enough to get in four World Series and he was the best there ever was at taking a bunch of moderately talented kids out of the minor leagues and making them think they were the 1927 Yankees,” Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray wrote in 1990. “No one has yet been able to figure to this day how he got the 1988 team in the World Series, never mind winning it in five games.”