After reading Richard Goldstein's NYT obituary on Tommy Lasorda, the long-time manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, I've come to realize there is a higher ranking one can achieve: "marvelous character." I have a new goal.
Mr Goldstein gives us a paragraph early on in the obit that tells us: "Lasorda, a chubby left-handed pitcher had a brief and forgettable playing career—he threw three wild pitches in the first inning in the only game he started for the Brooklyn Dodgers—but went on to become one of baseball's marvelous characters."
Lasorda was connected with the Brooklyn Dodgers in some capacity virtually every year of his adult life. And he lived to be 93. Tommy's interests were easy to list: baseball and food. He was after all of Italian- immigrant heritage, so the food part was an absolute given.
I remember one those Baseball of the Week telecasts that revealed that Lasorda was growing tomato plants in the bullpen at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. How many plants there were, and what he did with the tomatoes was not revealed, but you'd clearly expect they went into some sauce.
Lasorda was basically a lifer minor-league player, until he was a lifer major league assistant manager, manager, and executive. He would tell you he bled Dodger Blue. He didn't quote Shakespeare's Shylock, but he expected that if his skin was pricked, the blood would come out blue.
And he could be prickly. Arguing with umpires in that lovable fashion that baseball managers used to display when they disagreed, to wrestling with the other team's furry mascot when something set him off. Boston's Pedro Martinez fighting the Yankee bench coach Don Zimmer was scary; Tommy rolling around with a sort of Disney character was nothing but funny.
Lasorda was not from Brooklyn, but he did play briefly for the Dodgers when they were in Brooklyn and before they re-enacted Original Sin and moved to the West Coast after the 1957 season. There are people still alive who will never forget, or ever forgive that transition.
There's no mention if Tommy ever got to Rao's restaurant in East Harlem when he was in town, or if he and Joe Torre ever made it down to Ponte's for a plate of pasta. But I'm sure he never left New York hungry.
Baseball was hard to pay attention to this year, with a severely shortened season due to Covid-19 restrictions. Lost in the blur of daily news was the fact that the Dodgers did win the 2020 World Series, played in the so-called bubble, and that Tommy Lasorda attended the winning game, popping up from his wheelchair in a private box at Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas as the Dodgers clinched the series and exclaimed his patented acknowledgment of victory: "Oh yeah!"
http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com
No comments:
Post a Comment