Chance to Say Farewell to One Boy of Summer

Feel cheated? Feel the lack of a wholesome outlet for hostility? Ballplayers interfere with your God-given right to vent your spleen at the ballpark when they went on strike? Afraid you’ll find yourself walking around with all this pent-up indignation? Afraid you might end up going home and kicking the dog?

Maybe you’re an upbeat person. You feel the need to encourage someone. Be positive. You want to get in the game with an optimistic outlook. Help the boys, not rag ‘em. Instead of saying, “Call yerself a ballplayer, do you, Karros? You couldn’t hit water if you fell in!” you want to say, “We’re wit ya all the way, Eric, baby! We’ll get him next time! This guy’s got nothin!”

Either way, you’ll get a chance to work out your frustrations Sunday night at the Hyatt Regency Downtown. It might be your last chance for a long while to boo or cheer real live Dodger ballplayers.

You remember Dodger ballplayers? Used to wear these blue and white uniforms with the red numbers? Came in all shapes and sizes. Power hitters, bunters, curveballers, knucklers. Used to play that funny game, nine a side, three strikes you’re out.

You remember Casey at the bat? Koufax, Drysdale, Podres, Osteen. The Vulture. Phil Regan. Nobody hit 48 homers by midseason off that bunch. There was Garvey. Lopes and Russell. They had their own Reggie--Smith. They had the Dook. Pee Wee.

We used to get our aggressions out. Also our joys. Kirk Gibson limping up to the plate to hit the homer that would win the Series. Maury Wills stealing the Giants blind.

Mike Piazza and Eric Karros won’t be facing any 3-2 counts, but they will be facing a roast with Vin Scully as emcee and it’ll probably be their last appearance before a baseball crowd in God knows how long. Baseball may just be a cobwebbed memory, as long gone as the one-horse shay, the buggy whip and the bicycle built for two.

There’s another reason to attend Sunday night. The dinner honors what may be the last of the Dodgers, but it also honors the manager’s late son, Tommy Lasorda Jr., a young man who died too soon and too tragically three years ago. The proceeds of the dinner will be used to build a gymnasium in his name in Orange County, a facility that will benefit all youngsters and, thus, all of us.

Spunky Lasorda, as he was known to family and friends, was, like a lot of us, miscast in the world he grew up in, his father’s world. Ministers’ sons run away to join the circus, doctors’ sons become movie actors. Spunky grew up in a world of hit-and-run, sacrifice flies, home runs and home stands, bunts and base hits, but his tastes ran more to brushes and oils than bats and balls. His heroes were more apt to be Michelangelo than Michael Jordan, da Vinci than DiMaggio. A world series was a floor in the Louvre.

Part Pennsylvania Italian, part Tennessee Williams (he was born in his mother’s native South Carolina), the young Tommy probably belonged more philosophically to Hollywood than to the National League. He was gifted, imaginative. He could whip out a cocktail napkin and do a caricature of you between the soup and the salad. He had the sure eye for color of an Impressionist.

He was, like his father, lively, gregarious, witty, animated, seldom still. He smiled a lot. Still, his milieu was the art gallery, not the dugout.

He died at thirty-something, when life is supposed to be just beginning, not ending, struck down after contracting HIV, the dreaded scourge of the 20th Century.

He deserves to be remembered, and his mother, Jo, cast about for ways to keep his memory evergreen. She knew she had found one when the ballplayer turned minister, John Werhas, suggested the community badly needed a gymnasium. Jo felt a prayer had been answered. Sunday’s dinner is a big start for the Tommy Lasorda Jr. Memorial Foundation.

So, even though it’s not a seat in the upper deck from which to hurl nice safe insults, it’s a way to get your final hoots or hails at the heart of the Dodgers’ lineup. Baseball never stood taller than when it was helping children.

You can say goodby to a sport that left us. And you can lay a flower on the grave of a young son who never will.