It’s tempting to say that Tommy Lasorda’s...

It’s tempting to say that Tommy Lasorda’s restaurant chain has two strikes against it.

After all, the Dodger manager’s eateries in Marina del Rey and Pasadena have folded, the latter after it was cited for numerous health code violations.

Opening Day ’90 arrived Monday with his roster reduced to one: Tommy LaSorda’s in Lakewood.

General manager Steve Rich couldn’t explain why the name is spelled with a capital “S” on this branch--”maybe there was some type of mix-up,” he said--but he was optimistic that the more limited menu will be a hit with fans.

“We serve Italian and American food but we don’t have ribs (as did the Marina and Pasadena spots),” he said.

Rich dismissed speculation that Lasorda, who is a part owner, may have hurt his own business with his much publicized diet.

“He’s still allowed one meal a day,” the restaurant manager said of the baseball manager. “He comes in here all the time to have pasta.”

Still, it remains to be seen if, business-wise, Lasorda is stretching himself thin.

In case you’re keeping score. . . .

Lasorda’s boys couldn’t buy a hit in the early going Monday, which no doubt accounts for what may have been the earliest Opening Day appearance ever of a beach ball in Dodger Stadium: The fourth inning.

The stadium guards, who appeared to be in mid-season shape, chased the illegal sphere down in less than 10 minutes.

Lake Wobegonite-turned-New Yorker Garrison Keillor seemed relieved to be back in Gotham City after performing a show here with the L.A. Philharmonic.

“When you walk down the street in New York,” Keillor said on his radio show, “you don’t find a lot of people decrying the fact that New York is becoming more and more like Los Angeles.”

Call it The Hunt for the Yellow Chicken.

Officials of an El Pollo Loco franchise in Sherman Oaks are searching for the 20-foot-tall inflatable balloon mascot that was rustled from the premises six weeks ago. In exchange for its return, they’ve offered a reward of “12 free chicken combos,” no questions clucked.

The failure of the California Democratic Party to endorse either John Van de Kamp or Dianne Feinstein for the gubernatorial nomination over the weekend at the L.A. Convention Center calls to mind the old Will Rogers quip:

“I am not a member of any organized party--I am a Democrat.”

Noting that a $285 extension course, Field Studies of California Birds, meets in a room at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute, Ethan Figerote of Spring Valley Lake comments: “I guess you would have to be crazy to pay $285 to look at birds.”

miscelLAny:

Economy has its blessings. Some establishments feel they have to subject callers to annoying music after putting them on hold. Not so the financially strapped Long Beach Unified School District, which plays this recording: “Thank you. Please wait during the silence.”