Lasorda larger than life in Dodger Blue
He was a giant with the eyes of a child, a fighter with the softest of hearts, a Hall of Fame manager who acted like a high school cheerleader, a stalking and howling and gesturing ball of contradictions who spent nearly seven decades following a single truth.
Tommy Lasorda loved the Dodgers. He loved them beyond all reason, at the highest of volumes, through every chapter of a 93-yearold life. He loved them as their struggling pitcher, as their fiery manager, as their headstrong executive, as their wisecracking ambassador. In the end, he loved them as a frail elderly gentlemen who watched his final games at Dodger Stadium in the owner’s box, huddled underneath his Dodger blue jacket, often alone, but always at home.
Tommy Lasorda was the first to bleed Dodger Blue, and did so for nearly every bit of it of his time on earth, spilling it across every corner of the world, until he died late Thursday night after suffering a heart attack.
It is fitting that the last game he attended was the Dodgers’ title-clinching victory over the Tampa Bay Rays on Oct. 27, 2020, in Arlington, Texas. He left the world as he created it, a blue heaven on earth.
I can hear him now, his gravelly voice thundering from somewhere above, his crooked finger jabbing down through the clouds.
“Lemme tell you something! There really is a Big Dodger In The Sky!”
Tommy Lasorda loved the Dodgers so much, he became the Dodgers, the interlocking “L” and “A” forming the beginning of his name, and his loss creates a gaping hole in their culture. There will never be another Tommy. The sports establishment has become too businesslike to create one and, if it did, sports fans would be too cynical to accept him.
Lasorda was more than the tough manager who won World Series titles in 1981 and 1988. He was also the guy who once seemingly coached an injured child out of a coma and eventually used him as a batboy.
Lasorda was more than the second-winningest manager in Dodgers history, with the secondmost playoff wins. He was also a legendary eater who turned a weightloss challenge from Orel Hershiser and Kirk Gibson into a campaign that built a new convent for the Sisters of Mercy in Nashville, Tennessee.
He was a poor kid who grew up the son of Italian immigrants, in a Norristown, Pennsylvania, tenement, and he spent his life as a reflection of those roots. He literally had to talk his way into Vero Beach’s Dodgertown when he arrived late for his first spring training in 1948, and spent the next six decades attacking life with both a chip on his shoulder and gratitude in his heart.
His impossibly large and eternally round presence owned every room into which he walked. I spent 32 years following him through those rooms, covering him as a beat reporter, chronicling him as a columnist, then spending a year with him writing a book about his life titled, “I Live For This.” In all that time, I’ve never been around a more magnetic personality. He sold the Dodgers. He sold life.
Up close, his powerful presence was cratered with incongruities. Sometimes I loved him for making people so happy. Other times I wanted to scream at him for delivering little slights to those who would challenge him.
He was always loud, always hungry, always scheming. But he was also always hugging, always giving, so much that his players’ children called him “Uncle Tommy.”
One minute, he would be smiling and signing an hour’s worth of autographs for children. The next minute, he would scold one of the children for not being grateful.
He would remember nicknames and stories about every former player, and when those players returned after retirement, he would greet them like lost sons.
But if he felt a former colleague had disrespected him, he would act as if they never existed.
He was a world-class curser, his profanity appearing in every possible sentence structure and conjugation. Here’s hoping the Big Dodger In The Sky doesn’t ask him his opinion of Kingman’s performance. But, in his unapologetic old-school fashion, he tried to never curse around women or children, and he once asked that all curse words be removed from our book.
He was an all-star eater, constantly surrounding himself with food, with pregame meals so big and messy that he would often have to change his uniform shirt before heading to the dugout.
He made big money for motivational speeches, but he never charged schools, churches or the military.
Lasorda loved an audience and, goodness, he could really work a crowd. I’ve seen him give speeches that ended with hundreds of salesmen jumping to their feet and chest-bumping each other. I’ve heard him give talks that ended with a line of elderly women waiting to meet him while fighting back tears.
His best audiences, of course, were his Dodger teams. His ability to make believers out of that 1988 championship squad was arguably the best motivational work in baseball history. They were heavy underdogs to the New York Mets and Oakland Athletics.
Lasorda still has a museum-like office at Dodger Stadium. In perfect Tommy style, it contains a memento even for this moment.
On a shelf is his gravestone plaque.
“Dodger Stadium was his address, but every ballpark was his home,” it reads.
The Dodgers were indeed his address, his heart, his life, and even the voicemail message on a cellphone whose number never changed.
“If you don’t cheer for the Dodgers, you might not get into heaven,” Lasorda warned callers.
Today that heaven is a little louder, a little messier, and a lot more blue.