Tommy Lasorda

Before he became the voice and face of Dodger baseball, Tommy Lasorda was Thomas Charles Lasorda of Norristown, Pennsylvania, a Philadelphia suburb where he was born on September 22, 1927. He graduated from Norristown High School in 1944, already marked out by baseball. The game carried him from the Class D North Carolina State League to the United States Army, from Schenectady to Havana, from Montreal to Brooklyn, and eventually to Los Angeles, where he managed the Dodgers from 1976 through 1996.

Lasorda’s playing career was long, stubborn, and uneven in the way baseball careers often are. He signed with the Philadelphia Phillies as an amateur free agent in 1945, missed the 1946 and 1947 seasons while serving on active duty in the Army, then returned to pitch for the Schenectady Blue Jays. On May 31, 1948, he struck out 25 Amsterdam Rugmakers in a 15-inning game and drove in the winning run. The Brooklyn Dodgers drafted him from the Phillies organization in 1949, and he spent much of the next decade in the minors, especially with the Montreal Royals, where he became the winningest pitcher in team history with a 107-57 record.

His major league pitching career was brief: the Dodgers in 1954 and 1955, the Kansas City Athletics in 1956, and a final MLB line of 0-4 with a 6.52 ERA in 26 games. One rough Brooklyn start in 1955 included three wild pitches in an inning, tying a major-league record, and soon after he was replaced on the roster by Sandy Koufax. Yet Lasorda’s baseball education kept widening. He pitched in the Cuban League for Almendares and Marianao, and with the Denver Bears he found a model in manager Ralph Houk, whose approach taught him the value of treating players as people.

The Dodgers kept him close. Al Campanis hired him as a scout in 1960, and Lasorda moved into managing in the rookie leagues with Pocatello, then Ogden, Spokane, and Albuquerque. At Ogden, he asked players to write letters to the Los Angeles Dodger who played their position, telling that big leaguer they planned to replace him one day. His 1972 Albuquerque Dukes won the Pacific Coast League championship, and he also managed Tigres del Licey to back-to-back Dominican titles and a Caribbean Series title in Venezuela in 1973. That same year, he joined Walter Alston’s staff as the Dodgers’ third-base coach.

On September 29, 1976, after Alston retired, Lasorda became manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. He won two World Series championships, was named National League Manager of the Year twice, and was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame as a manager in 1997. His uniform number 2 was retired by the Dodgers. He was known as a fiery motivator, the kind of leader who could turn a clubhouse into a stage and a challenge into fuel.

Lasorda died on January 7, 2021, after a life spent almost entirely inside baseball’s daily grind. His words still fit because they sound like the man described by his career: impatient with passivity, loyal to effort, and certain that belief could move a team. “There are three kinds of people in this world,” he said, “people who make it happen, people who watch what happens, and people who wonder what happened.” Few baseball figures worked harder to be in the first group.