The longtime Dodgers manager enjoyed antics on and off the field. But his tactics propelled an underdog to a World Series title, and his vision helped expand the sport’s reach.
Tommy Lasorda was born on the first day of fall, the season that matters most in baseball. Many years later he would make a lasting autumn imprint, but on that day, in 1927, the Brooklyn Dodgers lost a doubleheader. Lasorda, from Norristown, Pa., would grow to be a scrappy left-handed pitcher for the team, but he would never win for them, either. Like Walter Alston, his predecessor as manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Lasorda appeared only briefly as a major league player. Alston was hitless in one at-bat; Lasorda was winless in a handful of starts. Yet they managed the team in an unbroken line from 1954 to 1996, combining for all six of the franchise’s championships before 2020. “Their strength was the strength of the Dodgers: They knew the minor league system, they knew how players got to be major leaguers, they understood the importance of scouts and player development — they knew it from the ground up,” Fred Claire, the former Dodgers general manager, said on Thursday. “Their personalities were different, but their foundations were nearly identical.” Until Lasorda’s death at home on Wednesday, at 93 years old, he was the senior member of the Baseball Hall of Fame. If there really is a Dodger blue heaven, as he always claimed, he could look down at the world and see his old team on top of it. He was watching from a ballpark suite, in Arlington, Texas, when the Dodgers clinched the World Series last October. “I think he needed to be there, you know?” Bobby Valentine said on Thursday. “Just like he needed to get home from the hospital to be with his wife, so she could say it’s OK.” Valentine, the longtime major league manager, was with Lasorda at Globe Life Field; a mutual friend, Warren Lichtenstein, had arranged for Lasorda to take a private plane to Texas, with a doctor by his side at all times. “He didn’t stand — we wheeled him in, and he sat the entire time — but with one out or maybe two outs in the last inning, he stood, and he watched the game standing, and when they won he threw both hands up over his head and said: ‘Oh yeah!’” Valentine said. “That ‘Oh yeah,’ for anyone who was ever around him, that’s what he was saying when he was running out of the dugout after they won: ‘Oh yeah, we did it!’” Lasorda’s teams won 1,630 games in the major leagues, postseason included. He guided the Dodgers to seven division titles, four World Series appearances and two championships, in 1981 and 1988. In retirement, he managed the United States baseball team — mostly minor leaguers — to gold at the Sydney Olympics in 2000. With Lasorda, though, the games were only part of the story.
