US Baseball Pro

The Los Angeles Dodgers have let Former Manager Tommy Lasorda Manage the Los Angeles Dodgers while Joe Torre is in Asia with some of the players. Even after all these years, don’t let the pot belly and marinara sauce fool you.

Tommy Lasorda is one of the great, old characters of MLB that makes baseball the sport with the richest history. For those of us who remember him as the feisty Manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers for what seemed like forever, his chit-chat and clown-like persona hid a very real competitive fire, spearheading a Los Angeles Dodgers team that was very competitive during Lasorda’s tenure.

Tommy Lasorda is now 80 years old, and has been in the Los Angeles Dodgers organization for almost 60 years. Back to the days of the Brooklyn Dodgers in fact, and Lasorda has known or played with all the great old Dodgers, from Jackie Robinson to Sandy Koufax. Lasorda reminds us that although the object in MLB is to win, you can have a good time doing it.

When the best Managers of MLB are discussed, Lasorda’s name is not top-of-mind, and maybe it shouldn’t be. But his record is excellent, and he did win the World Series twice. Included was the 1988 Dodgers team that was woeful offensively, yet got by the New York Mets and Oakland A’s, both teams that had much more firepower than Lasorda’s Dodgers.

It was good to see Tommy Lasorda back in a Dodgers uniform, albeit for a short while. They do not make them like that anymore, and in a time when MLB has all the negative headlines it could imagine, that is a shame.