New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Valentine remembers Lasorda, his coach and friend
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.