Lasorda a Hall of Famer at Hype

A baseball manager is usually this kind of guy:

He sits in a corner of the dugout and spritzes the shoes of the hangers-on with sprays of tobacco juice.

His whole life is baseball and if you asked him who Gorbachev is, he’d try to remember if that was the name of a left-handed pitcher he had once in Des Moines.

He probably never rose above the minor leagues either as a player or a manager, and if he had a major league at-bat he probably struck out or popped up.

He goes by the “book,” whatever that is, a hoary unwritten old testament on how to play the game handed down from generation to generation--you bunt with men on first and second and no one out, you play to win on the road and to tie at home, you never let a left-handed hitter bat against a left-handed pitcher unless he’s Babe Ruth, you play the infield in with a man on third and fewer than two out and you never, ever, pitch to a Henry Aaron or a Will Clark with the game on the line.

He’s predictable, colorless, conservative. He’s the kind of guy who would stand on 16 at blackjack. He plays what he likes to think are “the percentages.” He takes the safe, no-risk way. In golf he’d be a layup artist; in tennis he’d stay on the baseline.

He’s in no demand at all as an after-dinner speaker. You should get a free season ticket if you could name the current (or past) manager of the Minnesota Twins or Milwaukee Brewers.

He’s America’s ultimate scapegoat. When the wolves gather around the sled, management throws him out to them. It’s almost never his fault if the team goes sour, but in baseball he takes the rap. He has the job security of a nearsighted guy on a bomb squad. He doesn’t belong to a union. He doesn’t have an agent. He makes about half what a utility infielder makes, but he’s supposed to tell multimillionaires what to do.

Only a few managers in the history of the game have managed to rise out of anonymity and above their players--Connie Mack, who couldn’t be fired because he owned the team; John McGraw, who managed in an era when players were peons; Casey Stengel, who was a character right out of Rumpelstilskin who made even the lordly, haughty Yankees seem lovable.

And then there’s Tommy Lasorda. . . .

Lasorda was born to manage a baseball team. If you rang up Central Casting and told them, “Send me a manager type,” they’d send you Tommy Lasorda. He is as perfect for his role as Clark Gable was for Rhett Butler--or Charles Laughton for “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”

In the days before the diet, he even looked like a baseball. With bowlegs. There was no finer sight and sound in the game than Tommy Lasorda on the spoor of an umpire who had made a bad call. It was Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, as American a scene as a barn dance.

No one knows how good a manager he is--it’s an imprecise science--but he was good enough to get in four World Series and he was the best there ever was at taking a bunch of moderately talented kids out of the minor leagues and making them think they were the 1927 Yankees. No one has yet been able to figure to this day how he got the 1988 team in the World Series, never mind winning it in five games.

But what Tommy Lasorda does, basically, is speak for baseball. And speak and speak and speak. It is said that his wife, Jo, is afraid to rap on a glass at home for fear Tommy will wake out of a sound sleep, jump up and begin shouting about the Great Dodger in the sky.

Lasorda can be pardoned for thinking God is a Dodger. No less than the cardinal of the archdiocese of New York leaned over to whisper to him at a service in St. Patrick’s Cathedral that he was wearing his Dodger warmup jacket under his cassock. The Pope himself once asked Tommy how the Dodgers were doing. He has been to the White House as often as the vice president.

Most managers go hunting or fishing in the winter. Lasorda goes to banquets. He sells Lasorda--but he also sells baseball.

Which is why Lasorda found himself in a little Christian college in the bowels of southern Illinois in a county (Bond) that boasts it has no traffic lights one day last month. The school, Greenville College, enrollment 850, was doing a little fund raising.

Lasorda was there, speaking without fee, because Robert Smith, the vice president of the college is (a) a friend of Lasorda and (b) a friend of baseball.

Smith lobbied tirelessly for baseball’s inclusion into the Olympic Games, and it will become a full medal sport in Barcelona in 1992. He is president of the International Baseball Assn., recognized by the International Olympic Committee as the governing body of amateur baseball worldwide.

Lasorda approves. Which is why he found himself, during a seven-city swing through the East and Midwest, at a fund-raising dinner at the little campus in Greenville.

“I use every chance I get to push baseball in colleges,” Lasorda explains. “Look, the football programs get everything in the colleges. They want a new field house? Build it! They want a new press box? Build it! Gold uniforms? Buy them!

“Baseball has to scrimp and save and scrap for everything they get. They use aluminum bats because they last longer. Do you think they’d use aluminum footballs? In baseball in college, they have to go in the stands to get back the balls sometimes. Sure, football brings in the revenue. But baseball is the orphan. Baseball takes a back seat.

“Why? Every place I go they want to talk about baseball! Why, I was the grand marshal for the Columbus Day parade in New York and I led 37,000 people down from 43rd Street to St. Patrick’s, and every one of them come up to me and say, ‘What’re you taking Strawberry for?’ I say, ‘Don’t you want him to be happy?’

“People want to talk about baseball. It makes them feel good. They come up to me in airports. They say, ‘Do you think you can catch Cincinnati?’ I say, ‘Cincinnati’s got to catch us! We got a marquee player, a sure Hall of Famer. He hits back walls with his homers.’

“They ask me, ‘Will (Orel) Hershiser come back?’ and I say, ‘If you’re gonna bet on anybody, you’re gonna bet on the Bulldog!’

“Everybody wants to talk about baseball! It’s the universal language!”

There are only a few managers in the Hall of Fame as managers--Mack, Stengel, Bill McKechnie, Harry Wright, Miller Huggins, Joe McCarthy. (McGraw made it as a player; Leo Durocher should have made it long since.) They invented the bunt, the intentional walk or the hit and run.

Tommy Lasorda should make it for inventing, or at least perfecting, hype. He found a way to make the manager a star. And baseball, any sport, needs stars.