The Big Rumor in the Sky : Many Wonder if This Is Lasorda’s Last Season With the Dodgers

The full pitcher of beer spills across the table much too quickly for a man of 64 who has slept two hours in two days.

Tom Lasorda, a nondrinker, shoves his chair back into the cluster of surrounding fans. He smiles faintly.

“Don’t worry, I’m too quick, it never touched me,” he announces, his feet safely under the tavern table where nobody can see liquid dripping from his shoes.

Even on a long night during his endless winter banquet circuit, the Dodger manager never sheds his bravado. Lasorda does his best to never let you see him sweat.

But after 15 seasons as a manager, he finds it harder to hide his doubts.

In the final year of a two-year contract, Lasorda says he is not ready to contemplate retirement. He says he wants to manage until at least 1993.

But for the first time in a long time, he does not know what Dodger owner Peter O’Malley is thinking.

And O’Malley is not saying.

“I want to manage a couple of more years . . . if Peter comes up to me right now and wants to re-sign me, I would do it,” Lasorda says. “I’ve got the greatest life in the world, getting to be on the field during the summer and making my speeches during the winter. Right now, I’m just not ready to give it up.”

Lasorda sighs, and adds: “But I don’t know what Peter is thinking. I have no idea. If he says to me, ‘Get out,’ I guess there is nothing I can do about it.”

O’Malley would make only one comment concerning his plans for Lasorda.

“Tommy’s future with the Dodgers organization is very bright,” O’Malley said. “He continues to do an outstanding job managing the club. We have not had a chance to talk about his future this winter. We hope to do so in the near future. But it is not a problem.”

With spring training having started Friday, it could become one.

Some players are already convinced Lasorda is a lame duck because managerial heir Bill Russell was sent to triple-A Albuquerque last winter. Others aren’t so sure. But most everyone is confused.

“I think for the team’s sake, something should be done during spring training,” one veteran said. “If the manager’s status is uncertain, then the players will not respect him as much. That’s the way it always works.”

Even Russell is unsure.

“Tommy is going to be around for one more year, two more years, who knows?” Russell said. “I do know I hope to be back up in a couple of years.”

If the decision is to move Lasorda to a front-office position as a club ambassador, as many have speculated, then it could be an even bigger problem.

Lasorda is adamant about not wanting Fred Claire’s job as executive vice president, but he would like to be used in a baseball capacity.

“If they want my expertise on baseball in some other form, they got it,” Lasorda says. “I’ve been around the game a long time. I hope they would want to take advantage of that.

“Would I want to be just a figurehead? I don’t know.”

Lasorda’s friends say they do know.

“Tommy will go somewhere else and manage for a couple of more years, no question,” said Vince Piazza, one of Lasorda’s closest friends from his hometown of Norristown, Pa. “I have never even heard him mention retiring. He just isn’t ready.”

Lasorda does not discount the possibility that he could leave the Dodger organization after this season.

“I’ve never really looked into it, I don’t know,” he says. “I just don’t know.”

While Lasorda has been in the final year of his contract many times before, it is an issue this year because of his age and because of his difficulties last season after the death of his son, Tom Lasorda Jr.

When Walter Alston retired as Dodger manager in the final week of the 1976 season, he was two months short of his 65th birthday. Lasorda turns 65 in September.

And while Lasorda keeps himself in good shape--you can’t be fat and collect checks from a diet supplement company--he admittedly showed signs of mental exhaustion during the second half of last season.

The Dodgers finished second for the second consecutive season and failed to win the division title for the fifth time in six years. When Alston retired, the Dodgers had failed to win the division in five of the previous seven years.

“During the entire second half of the season, Tommy was in mourning for his boy,” Piazza said. “He wasn’t himself. That affected everything.”

Lasorda acknowledges that, at times, he also struggled with the changing attitudes among his ever-changing roster.

“The manager of yesteryear cannot manage today, you have to change, and I have changed,” he says. “It’s not like it was when I took over the club in 1977. Back then, 17 of the 25 players had played for me in the minor leagues, and four more had come through our farm system. They were all my children. They bled Dodger blue.”

Lasorda shakes his head.

“Then last year, I would look out on the field and, if Mike Scioscia wasn’t playing, sometimes all eight position players would be from other organizations,” he says. “They are all my adopted children now. And while I love them all, deep down you can never love anyone more than you love your real children.”

Lasorda adds: “You really have to work to bring them together. It’s harder to make them understand this is the greatest organization in the world.”

Lasorda has learned that it is also more difficult to make players care as much as he cares.

“Before, you ask a player to run through a wall for you, he does it,” Lasorda says. “Nowadays he asks, ‘What is on the other side of the wall? Why should I run through it? What’s in it for me?’ ”

Lasorda says he has mellowed to fit the players’ needs. Most players agree.

“I love playing for Tommy, and I think all of us would like to win one more time just for him,” Darryl Strawberry said. “What is not to like about playing for Tommy? He just lets you play.”

If the Dodgers do win the World Series this year, Lasorda’s ideas about retirement could change.

“That is really all I want anymore, one more title, I want the hat trick,” Lasorda says.

But even though he won a World Series and manager of the year honors as recently as 1988, Lasorda’s value to the club remains at least as high off the field as in the dugout.

A recent one-day trip to Spokane featuring speeches to two sports banquets in a span of eight hours serves as an illustration.

He coaxes strangers into announcing their love for the Dodgers, he even urges large audiences to pray for the Dodgers. And only some members of those audiences think he’s joking.

“There is nobody more recognizable in all of baseball than Tom Lasorda,” Claire said. “When he goes out into the public, it is like magic.”

The Spokane journey, one of dozens he makes during the winter promoting the Dodgers, begins at the unmagical hour of 5 a.m. That is when Lasorda wakes up at his Fullerton home, two hours after being roasted at a Friars Club dinner.

He arrives at LAX one hour before his 8 a.m. flight, just in time to position himself behind the counter at his departing gate.

“Good morning sir, you are flying a great airline, just like the Dodgers are a great baseball organization,” Lasorda tells a stunned businessman, taking his ticket.

After dropping into an aisle seat--”I can’t sit on the window of a plane anymore, I don’t know why”--Lasorda dotes on the star-struck attendants as if he were their grandfather.

He gives one attendant an autograph only after she uses the intercom to announce to the other passengers: “I love the Dodgers sooooo much.”

He comments on the color of another attendant’s eyes--”They are Dodger blue,” he told her--and rewards her by slipping a souvenir Dodger ring on her finger.

When the plane lands in Portland for a brief stopover, he insists on walking through the airport concourse. He is surrounded by stares and whispers, but apparently nobody has the nerve to approach him.

When a man wearing a New York Yankee cap timidly waves from the coffee shop, Lasorda makes a move.

“You’re wearing the wrong cap, buddy,” Lasorda says, approaching the man, who is sitting with his wife and young daughter.

Lasorda learns they are taking their first trip to Disneyland. Soon he is using the little girl’s Minnie Mouse doll as a puppet, moving it across the table while speaking to the girl in a high-pitched voice.

He is, of course, trying to coax her into saying she loves the Dodgers. The man and his wife stare in amazement.

“Being out with the people like this . . . this is my linguine, this is my steak,” Lasorda says as the plane leaves for Spokane.

Lasorda arrives in time to give a speech at a local youth sports banquet. The room is filled with high school students from remote areas of the Pacific Northwest. Door prizes of T-shirts and footballs are being passed out among speakers.

Lasorda talks with the intensity that he uses when addressing the Dodgers.

“An education,” he shouts, “is far more important than winning.”

After the banquet, a dozen students jog across a bridge spanning the Spokane River in chase of Lasorda’s limousine. They catch him at the hotel, where he stops on the sidewalk in the freezing weather to sign every autograph.

“Why are you guys out of breath?” he chides.

Several hours later he returns to the same dais to speak at an amateur and professional sports banquet. Despite the presence of hometown football hero Mark Rypien and world champion decathlete Dan O’Brien, nobody is cheered louder than the out-of-towner telling corny Steve Sax jokes.

When banquet organizers finally drag Lasorda from autograph seekers, it is 10 p.m. He has slept two hours in two days. A local businessman asks him to visit his sports tavern.

“Oh, I am so tired, please, do I have to?” he asks. Then, seeing the long faces of his hosts, he agrees.

Thirty minutes and one spilled pitcher of beer later, he is driven back to his hotel. In his suite moments later, he falls asleep with the lights on and television blaring.

Six hours later, he is at the Spokane airport, headed for the next show.

“You like the Dodgers, don’t you?” he barks at an unsuspecting traveler at 5:45 a.m. the next day. “Good!”