Pioneer Days

In seven days, Tom Lasorda will become the 14th manager, and 15th Dodger, inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame. This is the first in a series recounting his 31-year managerial road from Pocatello to Cooperstown.

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His first game was two games, a doubleheader against the Magic Valley Cowboys on June 27, 1965.

His first win was two wins, a doubleheader sweep.

His first motivational speech was a brawl.

The initial breaths of Tom Lasorda’s managerial career were like everything else along this desolate stretch of gently sloping mountains and still, salted lake--loud, dramatic and streaked with blue.

His Pocatello Dodgers were playing an Angels’ team from Idaho Falls. Lasorda thought all Dodgers should hate all Angels. He would show his kids why.

A foul ball off a Dodger bat rolled to the dugout, stopping at Lasorda’s feet.

He examined the ball for scuff marks, accusing the Angel pitcher of cheating.

He threw the ball into the dugout, convicting him.

He stared at the mound, challenging him.

“Next thing I know, I see Angels coming out of their dugout with bats,” recalled Don Sherwood, Lasorda’s first minor league general manager. “I’m thinking, ‘Oh, no, they have more players than we do, we’re gonna get killed.’ ”

Lasorda’s team met them at the pitching mound, the round rookie manager in the lead, bobbing and weaving like a pinata.

“Real fists flying. Jaws being hit. Heads being turned around. Everybody really fighting,” Sherwood said. “No cops around, nobody to stop it.”

By the time it ended, there were more Dodgers standing than Angels.

A couple of days later, Fresco Thompson, then-Dodger farm director, asked Sherwood how Lasorda was progressing.

“I told him he was the best manager I had ever seen,” recalled Sherwood, moonlighting from his real job as the owner of a sporting goods store.

“Of course. Fresco didn’t know he was the only manager I had ever seen.”

So went Tom Lasorda’s Pioneer Days; four howling, boot-scooting summers in the high country of Idaho and Utah that marked the beginning of his managerial career.

He was a 37-year-old scout and former failed major league pitcher who had been bugging the Dodgers for a dugout. They finally sent him to the most remote one they could find, in the short-season Pioneer League, professional baseball’s version of nursery school, only with more crying.

His job was to manage entry-level players for the Dodger farm team; first in Pocatello, then two hours south in Ogden, Utah.

The stadiums were crumbling. The crowds were smaller than those he would later see in his Dodger Stadium office. He worked out of a laundry room.

He sometimes sold tickets, took tickets, made team meals.

That is, when he wasn’t attacking opposing fans with squirt guns, figuring out ways to pad the house, or staging fights.

This is where Lasorda first learned the skills--or was it tricks?--that enabled him to become one of sport’s best motivators.

This is where one tiny part of the world became the first to learn about Lasorda.

And still hasn’t forgotten.

“Three of the most memorable years of my life,” said Dutch Belnap, Lasorda’s general manager in Ogden.

“Incredible to watch,” said Sherwood.

The two ballparks Lasorda called home here have long since been torn down. The hotels where he lived have been bought out, his favorite restaurants closed.

But the memories remain: in autographed photos on paneled walls in mountainside neighborhoods, in the minds of older men who talk about him as if he had managed there this morning.

These are the sorts of tales Lasorda has told for years.

It is truly startling to hear them told by those who were there.

You want first? We’ve got firsts.

First pinch-hitter.

Lasorda had a muscular player named Sonny Sexton who was being heckled by fans in Salt Lake City.

He pulled Sexton from the game, ordered him to change into street clothes, and directed him to sit in the stands, next to the trio.

“The rest of the game, Sexton is telling these guys, ‘My manager told me that if you say one more thing bad about the Dodgers, I’m supposed to bust you in the mouth,’ ” recalled Belnap, now athletic director at Weber State. “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.”

First rain delay.

Lasorda was heckled so much in Twin Falls that he once ordered Belnap to bring him some squirt guns. He spent the last few innings leaning out of the dugout and spraying the fans.

First disciplinary action.

During a frontier celebration in Caldwell, Idaho, Lasorda once arranged for one of his struggling players to be arrested by the local sheriff and thrown in a mock jail.

First intentional brushback.

Lasorda once rounded up his Ogden reserves and challenged the starters to an intrasquad game with Lasorda pitching.

Lasorda bet every starter a steak that they could not score against him in five innings.

“So the first time each guy came up, he threw directly at their heads, knocked them all down,” Belnap recalled. “They were so intimidated, they never got past second base.”

First injury adjustment.

An Ogden kid once limped up to Lasorda complaining of a sore ankle.

Unlike many other minor league teams, Lasorda’s Pioneer League squads never had a trainer. He thought they were for weaklings.

“So Lasorda tells the kid to stick the ankle in the whirlpool,” Belnap says. “And the kids says, ‘What whirlpool?’ And Lasorda points to the toilet.”

For all of his bluster, these four years were nonetheless Lasorda’s greatest managerial learning experience.

It was here where he learned how much he hated losing.

His Pocatello club trailed first-place Treasure Valley by two games with six remaining in his first season. All six were against Treasure Valley.

The Dodgers couldn’t pull it off, committing 11 errors and losing, 21-5, to begin that final stretch, eventually finishing two games out of first.

He quietly left town the day after the end of the season. The franchise was purchased and relocated in Ogden.

And he and Sherwood, although friendly, have not spoken since.

This despite the fact that Sherwood is retired from the sporting goods business and now lives in--get this--Laguna Hills.

“I just never wanted to bother him,” said Sherwood, 77. “I remember, he didn’t say a word after that season ended, he and [his wife] Jo just got in the car and drove away.”

It was also where Lasorda learned how much he loved winning.

He won Pioneer League championships in each of the next three seasons in Ogden, with three completely different lineups, with future major leaguers making an impact only on his third team.

He made such an impression that he may have become the first manager in history to be honored with an appreciation day . . . before the end of the season.

After being presented with golf clubs, a TV, and a dog he named Oggie, Lasorda wept.

Shortly thereafter, he clinched the third championship, and now it was the players who cried. Among those were professional rookies Bill Buckner, Steve Garvey and Bobby Valentine.

Also in attendance was Peter O’Malley, the young Dodger boss who was so impressed, he bought everyone dinner at the local Ramada Inn.

“You could see that Peter was enamored with Tommy and what he could do,” Belnap said, describing the roots of an affection that served Lasorda well during several embattled Dodger seasons.

Not that Lasorda didn’t earn it, the locals say.

Lasorda was apparently the hardest-working baseball man in either town’s history, arriving at the ballpark every morning at 10 a.m. to tutor youngsters, staying late every night to holler at them.

A favorite clipping in these parts is one from a Caldwell sportswriter, who concurred it would take the town several days to clean out the dugout after it was filled with Lasorda’s cursing.

He also surprised the league with his daring.

In Pocatello, he called for 11 suicide-squeeze plays in 66 games and was successful on 10. He was also famous for sending runners home from third base on foul pops behind first base.

It soon became obvious, you didn’t fall asleep on a Lasorda team.

He instituted a no-peanuts rule for the Ogden bullpen, waited a month, then sent a batboy to the bullpen with bags of the illicit treat.

A couple of innings later, he surprised several players with shells around their feet. A $25 fine accounted for more than a week of meal money.

When he wasn’t working the players, he was working the fans.

In Belnap’s job as a minor league general manager, he was charged with selling everything from tickets to outfield advertising for the 2,000-seat park.

He said Lasorda taught him the main rule of this grass-roots game: Never disappoint anybody who can make you rich.

Lasorda would get mad at Belnap for awarding too many “lucky number” prizes to fans in the cheap seats.

“He reminded me that the people in the good seats were the ones who might buy billboard space in the outfield,” he said. “He told me to pick their numbers more often.”

When the Dodger officials came to town, Lasorda would take over the club’s promotions with one announcement.

“Suddenly, it was 10-cent ticket night and nickel hot dog night,” Belnap said. “For one of the few times during the summer, the place would sell out, and the Dodgers would be real happy.”

In those same games, he liked to impress the brass with his team’s fire.

So if there wasn’t a reason to fight, he would create one, but safer than the rookie brawl against the Angels.

He and his team would act out previously choreographed maneuvers in which certain players would hold him in the dugout while others ran a few steps on to the field.

“Tommy had an answer for everything,” Belnap said. “He was amazing. He was going places. We all knew it.”

Pocatello no longer has a minor league team, its concrete and steel parks now filled with the sounds of soccer and American Legion.

Ogden rejoined the Pioneer League a few years ago after a 20-year absence. But this is more of a marketing device than a baseball nine, with a designer dinosaur logo and a home in one of those brand-new ballparks designed to look quaint.

Amid the muffled heat of a recent summer afternoon, a stooped, aging woman looked up from behind an empty downtown lunch counter.

“Tom Lasorda?” asks the woman. “Wasn’t he was loud one?”

In seven days, Tom Lasorda will become the 14th manager, and 15th Dodger, inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame. This is the first in a series recounting his 31-year managerial road from Pocatello to Cooperstown.

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Minor Miracles: Lasorda’s minor league record:

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1965 Pocatello 2nd 33-33 1966 Ogden 1st 39-27 1967 Ogden 1st 41-25 1968 Ogden 1st 39-25 1969 Spokane 2nd 71-73 1970 Spokane 1st 94-52 1971 Spokane 3rd 69-76 1972 Albuquerque 1st 92-56

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