Bobby Valentine was sitting in the bleachers, watching a game at Southern Cal, when a man walked up and sat down beside him. Looked like a scout.
“He tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Hey, I hear you’re a pretty good ballplayer from Connecticut,” Valentine remembered.
He handed Valentine a transistor radio, a big deal in 1968, with the Dodgers logo on it. “Take this as a little gift from me, but don’t say where you got it,” he said.
Three weeks later the Dodgers signed Valentine, taking him away from USC, where he could have played football and baseball, and when he got off a plane in Utah to begin his journey, he was greeted by his first minor league manager. “I’m the guy that gave you the transistor radio,” Tommy Lasorda told him.
“We drove home from the airport,” Valentine says, “and he said, ‘You know, you’ve got a lot of responsibilities as the No. 1 pick of the Dodgers … and the first thing you’ve got to do is take the manager to dinner.'”
And that, to borrow Humphrey Bogart’s last line in “Casablanca,” was the start of a beautiful friendship.
They went out and got a good steak, Valentine picking up the tab with his bonus money. The No. 2 pick, Bill Buckner, didn’t buy dinner for the skipper, as Valentine tells it, but went on to have a great career just the same.
In recent months, Valentine, 70, from Stamford and now the AD at Sacred Heart University, has lost a lot of friends and contemporaries from his baseball career; Hall of Famers Tom Seaver, Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, Joe Morgan and Phil Niekro were admired National League opponents when he first came up with the Dodgers in 1969. Dick Allen was a favorite teammate in Los Angeles in the 1970s.
Last Friday, Valentine got a call at 3 a.m. and learned he’d lost his baseball guru. Lasorda, 93, had died. For 52 years they had shared their baseball lives.
“Tommy dodged death for the better part of the last six or seven years,” Valentine said. “I flew out to California no less than four times to say goodbye to him. He was bigger than life. He was the most amazing person I’ve ever been around. He knew everyone’s name. He knew every story, every pitch that was ever thrown and every at-bat that he ever saw. He could captivate an audience, whether it was the softball team at the Olympics or the world press corps at the White House.”
Lasorda joined the Dodgers organization in 1949 and spent nearly all of his baseball life with them, saying he “bled Dodger blue,” long before such phrases became a permanent part of the sports vocabulary. He made his name managing a core of players in the minor leagues that formed the championship teams he later had in Los Angeles. Valentine, who played for Lasorda at Ogden and Triple A Spokane, was well-known as a Lasorda guy, which seemed to irritate Walter Alston, the Dodgers’ longtime manager.
So by the time Lasorda replaced Alston, Valentine was traded away, but the friendship endured as Valentine played 10 years and then became a manager, leading the Mets to the World Series in 2000, often practicing what Lasorda preached.
“No players care what you know, until they know that you care,” Valentine said, “and Tommy, first and foremost, wanted his players to understand that he cared.”
There was only one Tommy Lasorda, but in his day there were a few managers who, like him, were colorful and commanded the stage. And therein lies something baseball has lost, because that kind of manager has just about disappeared from the game.
Lasorda could be coarse, of which the various tapes of his expletive-filled tirades that live in cyberspace offer a glimpse. He was a baseball manager who spit out his words, kicked dirt, who came to the park to win, but put on a show for the fans, too, just in case he didn’t. Casey Stengel and Leo Durocher and Billy Martin and Earl Weaver — Lasorda, who retired in 1995 and went into the Hall of Fame the next season, was of that kind, but with a dash of effervescence.
“He gave more signs than anybody else,” Valentine said. “In a World Series they won in 1988, he gave 18 hit-and-runs to beat the Oakland Athletics. There are teams now that don’t have 18 hit-and-runs in an entire season.”
And when the game was over, or the season was over, Lasorda’s work went on, because he represented baseball and the Dodgers everywhere he went. He knew and gloried in it. Managers of his generation sold the game at every stop.
“I saw him eating lunch at the White House captivating dignitaries from Italy,” Valentine said, “and Ronald Reagan stop and come in and sit down and for 30 minutes not say a word while Tommy told his stories. I saw him at West Point speaking to the cadets and seeing them give him a standing ovation. And I saw him pacing in the clubhouse in Ogden, Utah, addressing 22 rookie minor leaguers and wanting us to go fight an entire army on his behalf. He could adjust to any situation because he loved life. “
Lasorda loved Valentine’s parents, loved his mother’s cooking, “and my mother loved when he ate her cooking.” Of course, the average fan didn’t know Lasorda the way Valentine did, but he died with millions believing they knew him well, and that was his gift.
“What he did better and more often than anyone else on Earth is, he shared his experiences,” Valentine said. “He would share them with the guy on the street, the Little Leaguer in the South Bronx. He loved making people feel better.”
In fact, Valentine believes Lasorda allowed more people to take pictures with him than any celebrity there ever was, dating back long before the age of selfies, and his tribute will be to collect them. That will have to substitute for the kind of ceremony Lasorda would have had if not for the pandemic.
“The funeral isn’t going to be what it should be,” Valentine said. “He’s not going to lie in state for three days and let all the Dodger fans walk by in center field, like we had thought a couple of years ago. So we’re going to try to have people who have taken a picture with Tommy, or a picture with Tommy’s uniform on, to send them in and we’re going to make a mosaic with, I believe, Tommy with hundreds of thousands of people, and I’m hoping it will live on the internet or maybe live at Dodger Stadium.”
Me? I’m in. Someone snapped a picture of me, with a full head of hair and a Member’s Only jacket, with Lasorda and Valentine in 1988 at Bobby V’s old place in Milford. The pics can be uploaded on tommymosaic.org.
As Lasorda clung to life, Valentine would get a smile out of him by hollering, the way Lasorda hollered at players in his younger days, exhorting him to get out of bed and walk a few steps. The old skipper was stubborn enough to make it to Texas, where Valentine joined him last October to watch the Dodgers win the World Series. And he made it back to his home, where he wanted to be for the last out.
“Tommy did it his way,” Valentine said, “in living and in dying. The bite he took out of the apple was the apple of life, and he took a big bite.”
Dom Amore can be reached at damore@courant.com.
