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Overview
Tommy Lasorda is baseball's true immortal and one of its larger than life figures. A former pitcher who was overshadowed by Sandy Koufax, Lasorda went on to a Hall of Fame career as a manager with one of baseball's most storied franchises. His teams won two World Series, four National League pennants, and eight division titles. He was twice named National League manager of the year and he also led the United States baseball team to the gold medal at the 2000 Summer Olympics.
In I Live for This! award-winning sportswriter Bill Plaschke shows us one of baseball's last living legends as we've never seen him before, revealing the man behind the myth, the secrets to his amazing, unlikely success, and his unvarnished opinions on the state of the game. Bravely and brilliantly, I Live for This! dissects the personality to give us the person. By the end we’re left with an indelible portrait of a legend that, if Tommy Lasorda has anything to say about it, we won’t ever forget.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780547347271 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Bill Plaschke has been named the Associated Press Sports Columnist of the Year three times. He has been a columnist for the Los Angeles Times since 1996 and is a regular panelist on ESPN’s Around the Horn.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
I Fought for This
"Where is the concession stand?"
Tommy Lasorda marches through the dirt of a small city park on a cool fall Saturday in the San Fernando Valley. There are family members with him, but he is marching ahead of them. He takes long strides and his lips are pursed. He is only going to a girls' softball game, but he's still marching, because there will be people here who will stare at him and smile at him and surround him as if he were a triumphant returning general. He knows it. He plays to it.
He is marching like he once marched to the mound in a baggy Brooklyn Dodger uniform, a failed pitcher who always believed he was just one strike away. He's marching like he once marched to the mound in a too tight Los Angeles Dodger uniform, a manager carrying a giant chip, somebody always out to screw him, somebody always looking to send him from Hollywood back to where he's always afraid he belonged, the back alleys outside Philadelphia, turning him into just another sad-eyed, hook-nosed man driving a beer truck. He's marching like he marches across those same fields today as baseball's great living ambassador — nobody can touch him, nobody dares challenge him, a Hall of Famer who has earned every step of this march.
Only today, wearing a blue sweater, tan slacks, and brown suede shoes, the feared manager looks like everyone's favorite grandfather. And today that fits, because he is marching in to see his grandchild's softball game.
Her name is Emily Goldberg. She is the preteen second baseman on an all-star softball team. She calls him "Pop-pop." He loves that name. It feels like him. It even sounds like him. A left hook and a right jab. Pop. Pop. Even pushing eighty, he's the toughest of the tough guys.
He walks past swooning mothers and staring dads. He spots Emily standing on the field, a little girl with her grandmother's sweet face and her grandfather's sharp eyes. Lasorda's lips turn up in a weathered smile, and his arthritic fingers gently jab the air in a wave that glistens with a World Series ring. There are certain times when Lasorda's cartoonish exterior completely disappears, when the tough guy melts and the funny guy dissolves and all that is left is pure, unscripted emotion that can leave him looking stunned.
She is his only grandchild, born in the San Fernando Valley during the postseason of 1995. Lasorda drove to the hospital after a game and walked into the room while the doctor was giving Emily her first exam. He was so excited, he began shouting.
"Hey Doc, hey Doc, you a baseball fan?" he asked.
The doctor, wearing a stethoscope, could not hear him, so Lasorda shouted louder.
"Doc, I'm asking you. You a baseball fan?"
When the doctor realized what Lasorda was saying, he quietly answered "Yes" and returned to his examination. But Lasorda wasn't finished.
"OK, Doc. Then you must be a Dodger fan, right? Are you a Dodger fan?"
The doctor was preoccupied listening to Emily's heartbeat, so he couldn't hear Lasorda's bellows.
"I'm asking you, Doc. Are you a Dodger fan?"
When the doctor finally understood, he did not answer. He could not answer. He just shrugged. If only Lasorda knew that the first man to examine his most precious jewel was actually a San Francisco Giants fan.
As Emily grew, Lasorda's devotion grew with her, to the point where she is at the top of his speed dial. He calls her every day just to say hello. He will drive from his Fullerton home to see her, even if it's only to say good night, a ninety-minute trek for one kiss.
Some days their visits consist entirely of him watching her master the hula hoop. Other days he will fall asleep while sitting on the couch and she will crawl in by his side, neither needing words, both content to feel each other's breath.
As he settles into the stands to watch her play softball, the dialogue begins.
"Hey, Emmy!" he shouts in a voice that is smooth and reassuring.
"Hey, Pop-pop," she shouts back.
He stares at her, blinks, says nothing, as if rendered speechless by the sight of a Lasorda playing baseball again. Then he goes back to the business of being Tommy, a man in search of a concession stand, a man who must settle for a collection of confections on paper plates, snacks made by the moms.
"So, what have we here?" he says, staring down at some butterscotch cookies.
Whenever Lasorda goes somewhere new, the first thing he looks for is food. His twenty-year managerial career was defined by food. Pasta gave him his size, restaurants gave him his influence, dieting made him a national star, and regaining the lost weight made him a lovable human being. Each of his 1,599 victories was accompanied by food. Each of his two world championships ended in a celebration of food, which is not only his currency, it's his oxygen. In this case, he looks for the nearest person who would have such food, which would be a smiling mother. Sitting amid crushed Gatorade bottles and licorice wrappers, the mother opens a Tupperware container and deftly hands Lasorda a brown sugary square.
Mothers love Lasorda. They line up to hug him and brag about their husbands and ask for his blessing. They like him because he remembers their names and likes the color of their eyes, and isn't afraid to compliment them on their charm bracelets. They like him because they can hug him the way they used to hug their giant stuffed animals, two little arms around something large, cuddly, and soft. If they could, moms would take Lasorda home and prop him up on their bedroom shelf.
Lasorda knows that the way to anyone's heart — that of a player, a general manager, a sportswriter, or in this case one of Emily's friends — is through her mother. So he opens those arms wide.
"Have some coffee cake," says this mom.
"Mfmflflflfl," Lasorda says, filling his mouth.
Food crisis averted, Lasorda sits down to watch the only person in the world who can persuade him to drive for an hour and a half on a moment's notice just to watch her fall down while learning to skate.
"You've never seen anyone fall down like Emily," Lasorda says. "The thing is, you've never seen anyone get up like her either."
These are the stories he tells about his family. Stories of comebacks, stories of courage. This is how he defines not only himself but also those around him. Lasorda views life through the perspective of the fight. Even now. Especially now. At this stage of his life, when he has earned every creature comfort imaginable, it is a view that inspires him to keep punching, lest someone hit him first.
On this day, you would think that nobody is fighting anything. It's all little girls and colorful uniforms and laughs, right? Lasorda talks about Emily as if she were Ernie Banks or Albert Einstein. He brags about her hitting, her fielding, her spelling scores, just like any grandfather — only about ten decibels louder and in a voice that sounds remarkably like wooden wheels on a cobblestone road.
But then you look up and see a huge umpire crouched down behind home plate. So much for no fighting. As long as Lasorda is near an umpire, there is a chance for a fight.
"Hey, the umpire's in my way," he says, plopping down on a chipped wooden bleacher behind home plate after finishing his coffee cake. "That guy's so big, he'll block us from all angles."
You would think he's joking, but he's not. Years of arguing with umpires have left him eternally suspicious of anyone wearing dark blue and carrying balls in a fanny pack. Even if it's just some moonlighting history teacher standing behind the plate at a girls' softball game. Lasorda is perpetually wary of anyone besides him who would dare enforce the rules. To him, umpires have always represented how, with the simple waving of a hand or barking of a word, life can turn on you.
For all his public swagger, for all his youthful practical jokes, the only time Lasorda ever ended up in jail was because of an umpire.
It was in the Dominican Republic in the early 1970s, back when Lasorda spent every winter managing a team in the Caribbean, trying desperately to get noticed by a Dodger organization that already had a Hall of Fame manager named Walter Alston. His Dominican team was winning, 2–0. It was the bottom of the ninth, two out. The opposing hitter knocked a ball over the head of center fielder Von Joshua, into the darkness of deep center.
Joshua ran it down and threw it in. But one of the umpires called it a home run. He claimed that the original ball had gone over the fence and that Joshua had pulled a spare ball out of his pocket. Lasorda was so furious, he ran out of the cramped dugout onto the dying field. All around him, fans were singing and rattling noisemakers and pointing at him, jeering and cursing in Spanish. Lasorda ran up to the umpire and shouted, "You needle-nosed sonofa —"
He was ejected at "needle-nosed."
When the umpire threw him out, Lasorda decided he would go all the way out. He began carefully unbuttoning his shirt and gently taking it off. Then he threw it wildly into the stands. Next he bent over, untied his cleats, slipped out of them, and threw them over the outfield wall. Then he shrugged and, half naked, walked back into the small dugout and up the tunnel to the clubhouse.
"I was getting undressed after the game like everyone else," Lasorda remembers. "I was just doing it on the field."
Later, after he had showered — he was often the last guy to get dressed — Lasorda discovered a couple of strangers waiting for him in the clubhouse. They began speaking Spanish so quickly that Lasorda could barely comprehend. Only when he walked outside and saw the team bus driving away did he fully understand. They were the military police.
"My team was going home, but I was going somewhere else," he remembers.
A couple of hours later, he found himself behind the grimy bars of a Dominican jail, sharing a cell with a couple of vagrants and a woman who was madly screaming.
To quiet her down, "the soldiers came inside and hit her right in the face, knocked her cold. Scared the hell out of me."
Scared him clear to Sunday, apparently. The entire night of Tommy Lasorda's only night in jail, he stood in a corner and recited the Catholic Mass.
He was released the next day, with two explanations.
First, he had been arrested and charged with indecent exposure. "I told them, 'Because I had my shirt off in public, that was indecent exposure?'" Lasorda recalls. "I asked them, 'Don't you have boxing in this town?'"
Second, he was told that General Javier, the commanding presence in the small Dominican town, had bet on the other team to win the game. The umpire had to fix it in the final inning or face jail himself. That's why the double had become a phantom homer. And that's why Lasorda's argument never stood a chance. Lasorda heard this and shrugged. If anyone understood backroom justice, he did.
"The next day, my club's president warned me that everyone in the street was talking about my arrest," Lasorda remembers. "I told him, 'Good, because if they're talking about me, that means they're not talking about having a revolution.'"
Only Tommy Lasorda, it seems, could use the occasion of his arrest to take credit for saving a country. His time in jail, however, did have a profound effect on his life. No sports figure shows more respect for authority than Lasorda: he gives more free speeches before police and fire departments than even the smartest politicians.
"I see the pressure that these people operate under. I see what they're doing for our country," he says. "Believe me when I say that nobody has a better justice system than we do."
Today justice is blocking his view of his granddaughter, and he wants to change seats, but then he has another idea. This is also something he learned in the Dominican. He will stay in his seat and offer a bribe. He announces he will give the two softball umpires autographed balls, ensuring that they will not only try to stay out of his way, but perhaps also be kind to his beloved granddaughter.
"You catch more flies with honey than vinegar," he says with a wink. That has been one of his life mottoes: always be nice to the ones who threaten you the most; always keep your enemies close.
It's a simple theme for such a complex creature, but it's precisely how Lasorda began his baseball life. A career that would make him a celebrity on five continents and in five hundred cities, starting with five brothers and five straight miles.
In the early 1930s, on steamy summer mornings in Philadelphia, that's how far the sons of an Italian immigrant named Sabatino Lasorda would walk to play baseball. Not Little League or American Legion baseball. Not youth league or school or YMCA baseball. Just baseball. Just five boys from a cramped three-story row house in Norristown, Pennsylvania, which was then an aging industrial city about twenty miles from Philadelphia. Just five boys walking to an overgrown field known as Elmwood Park.
There was no scoreboard. There were no bleachers. There were no benches. There were no umpires. And, blessedly, there were no parents. There was just baseball.
Their opponents didn't come from a tryout but from a neighborhood, a family like the Lasordas, only with different accents. Lasorda and the other Italian kids would play the Irish kids. The winner of that game would play the Negro kids. The losers would wait on the playground. And on it would go, from jungle field to jungle gym to jungle field again, nobody keeping standings, nobody supplying snacks, nobody screaming anything about keeping your eye on the ball. Just boys and baseball.
One of the Lasorda boys didn't walk to get there. He ran. He was the one with the bushy black hair and the crooked nose and the fingers-on-the-chalkboard laugh. He was running today from the law that was his father's belt. He was always running from something.
Back at the house an hour earlier, ten-year-old Tommy Lasorda had been put in charge of cleaning the second floor, which had a bedroom and a bathroom. It wasn't that hard. But on mornings like this, with the sun shining and baseball calling, it was unbearable. Lasorda wanted to join his brothers immediately. He was the second oldest, the bold one, the fighter. Their team needed his spark. So he escaped his chores by using the hidden mop trick.
He grabbed the giant mop, a small bucket, and a few dirty rags and walked up the stairs to the second-floor hallway. But instead of cleaning and shining, he whacked the mop against the wall and rattled the bucket against the toilet. He made so much noise that his father, who drove a truck at a steel mill and understood the efficiency of noise, believed he was working.
Amid the echoing clatter, Lasorda stopped and quietly jimmied open the bathroom window. Then, before his father could notice the silence, he climbed out feet first, grabbed the drainpipe, shimmied down to the ground, and was gone, sprinting to the baseball game.
Several hours later, when the boys returned home, his father was waiting. Standing on the uncleaned second floor as his father removed his belt to begin a beating, Tommy made an announcement that would frame his life for the next fifty years.
"I'll take a one-minute beating for one day of baseball anytime," he said.
His brothers solemnly nodded and covered their ears.
The man doing the beating exuded the sort of tough love that the second-oldest son exhibits today. Sabatino Lasorda immigrated to the United States from the Italian region of Abruzzi. He never understood baseball. He barely understood English. He worked with his hands. His house was so rickety that when Sabatino died, his sons had to prop up the floor with pillars so it could hold the weight of his casket.
"But man, I tell you, my dad was rich," Lasorda says. "The things you hear me say today, that's my father talking."
His father would tell Tommy, "It doesn't cost you a nickel to be nice."
His father would say, "If you build a house and the foundation is off, everything you put on that house will be off. The foundation of life is love and respect."
Lasorda's first pep talks, when he managed minor league teams, came from his father, who preached, "If you have five guys on one rope, pulling together, they can pull half a town behind them. If they are pulling against each other, they go nowhere."
When Tommy didn't pull with his four brothers, he winced from his father's belt. Sometimes he winced even before he had a chance to pull. One day he was working in his family's backyard garden, where they grew vegetables — sometimes tomatoes would be their only dinner. His father wanted to water some plants, and so he handed Tommy a glass jug and asked him to fill it at a nearby spring. It was their last bottle. Tommy was reminded to be careful not to break it.
"Then all of a sudden my father hauls off and hits me," Lasorda recalls. "And I'm like, 'Why?'"
Sabatino Lasorda smiled and said, "What good would it do me to hit you after you break the bottle?"
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "I Live for This!"
by .
Copyright © 2007 Bill Plaschke and Tommy Lasorda.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Table of Contents,
Copyright,
Dedication,
Foreword,
I Fought for This,
I Gambled for This,
I Trained for This,
I Bounced Around for This,
I Hungered for This,
Photos,
I Was Born for This,
I Preached for This,
I Nearly Died for This,
I Cried for This,
I Was Reborn for This,
Tommy Lasorda's Managerial Record,
Acknowledgments,
Index,
About the Authors,