Lasorda's place in baseball lore

In one of the many great stories in "I Live for This! Baseball's Last True Believer" by Bill Plaschke with Tommy Lasorda, the young Tommy, on his way to a 13.50 ERA with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1955, is summoned to the Dodgers executive office. "Tommy, if you were general manager of this team," asked Buzzie Bavasi, "who would you cut?" Lasorda replied: "I would cut that Sandy Koufax kid."

That's the only bad advice Lasorda has offered in more than half a century in big league baseball. Had the Dodgers taken it, it might have cost them four World Series, the two Sandy Koufax pitched them to -- 1963 and 1965 -- and the two Lasorda managed them to -- 1981 and 1988.

It would have also cost baseball its most colorful and quoted manager since Casey Stengel. Not all of Lasorda's statements have been quoted verbatim, such as his famous response to radio personality Paul Olden after 1970s slugger Dave Kingman hit three home runs to beat the Dodgers. "What is your opinion of Kingman's performance?" asked Olden. Lasorda expressed his opinion in a statement that set a record for the use of bleeping.

That Lasorda never curses around his family or in public appearances is merely one indication of a character more complex than the caricature often conveyed by the media. Another, which illustrates his remarkable ability to motivate his players, is his practice of screaming at them about points of the game beforehand and letting them down gently after they made mistakes. When Steve Sax was having nightmarish throwing problems, writers asked Lasorda why he wasn't tougher on his second baseman. "What good would it do to criticize Saxie after the bad throw?" Lasorda shrugged. Through persistence, manager and player worked the problem through.

When persistence wasn't enough, Lasorda found other solutions. Pushing the U.S. Olympic baseball team to the gold medal in 2000, he lied to his players about how good they were: "The only chance we had to be great was to believe we were great. At that point, the truth didn't matter." He used similar tactics on his bespectacled right-hander, Orel Hershiser, calling him Bulldog. Yet, "the more Hershiser heard it, the more he believed it." He believed it enough to win the Cy Young Award.

Plaschke, a sports columnist for the Los Angeles Times and three-time Associated Press Sports Columnist of the Year, earns a quality start for outlining Lasorda's life from a cramped three-story row house in Norristown, Pa., through his rise as an untalented but scrappy pitcher to become the symbol of the Dodgers.