Colourful manager took Dodgers to glory twice
Baseball manager
TOMMY LASORDA was the colourful and cantankerous manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers who led the team to four National League pennants and two World Series championships in the 1970s and ’80s.
He died on January 7, aged 93. “In a franchise that has celebrated such great legends of the game, noone who wore the uniform embodied the Dodger spirit as much as Tommy Lasorda,” Dodgers chief executive 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.’’
Lasorda’s connection with the Dodgers dated back to 1949, when he was drafted as a pitcher while the storied National League club was still based in New York City’s Brooklyn borough.
But Lasorda’s tenure in the dugouts far outshone his playing career and he eventually became one of the team’s most enduring and widely recognised figures through several management changes.
Former US president George W. Bush, onetime coowner of baseball’s Texas Rangers in the American League, saluted Lasorda as a “fine ambassador for our national pastime”, recounting the Dodgers great “stepping in as third base coach for a tee ball game” of little leaguers on the White House South Lawn in 2007.
Fans most remembered him for delivering big wins during his two decades as manager, starting nearly 20 years after thenowner Walter O’Malley moved the team to Los Angeles as part of Major League Baseball’s expansion to the West Coast in ’50s.
Lasorda’s longevity and wit put him in the pantheon of such legendary longtime baseball managers as Casey Stengel and Yogi Berra, whose verbal prowess made them media darlings. As manager, he compiled a 15991439 regularseason record, leading the Dodgers to World Series victories in 1981 and 1988.
Sportswriters could count on Lasorda to pepper interviews with humorous quips. One of his best known was describing “three types of baseball players: those who make it happen, those who watch it happen and those who wonder what happened.”
He stepped down as manager in 1996 after suffering a mild heart attack.
But Lasorda, who was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1997, returned to the dugouts to manage the US baseball squad to a gold medal at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
Lasorda also parlayed his blustery persona and burly profile into a side career as a television pitchman for weightloss products during the 1980s and ’90s. But his affable image in TV ads contrasted sharply with a more combative side.
In 2000 convicted Hollywood madam Jody “Babydol” Gibson named Lasorda among two dozen celebrities she claimed had patronised her callgirl service.
Lasorda denied he ever knew Gibson and threatened through his lawyer to sue before the scandal blew over. — Reuters