He’s Head Over Heels in Love With Baseball

You phone him, worried.

“Worried about what?” Tom Lasorda shouts.

You tell him that watching his overweight, 73-year-old body tumbling backward at the All-Star game was scary before it was funny.

“Do you know what kind of response I got? Do you know how many people have called me to see if I was OK? Hundreds of people! From everywhere!”

You tell him that it seemed he reacted slowly to that flying Vladimir Guerrero bat, and that maybe someone with that sort of reaction should limit his time in a coaching box.

“Do you know how much I already coach third base? For our minor league teams? In Japan? I don’t have any trouble in those places. I was watching for a ball, not a bat!”

You hear a cell phone in the background. It is Lasorda’s cell phone. You know this because it rings to the tune of “The William Tell Overture.”

You wonder if Los Angeles’ oldest living baseball treasure should maybe slow down.

He tells you a story.

“After the whole bat thing was over, Bobby Valentine told me, ‘How many times have I heard you say you were going to die on a baseball field? Well, I thought this was it.’ ”

Lasorda howls again.

“I don’t want to die at all. I want to be the oldest major league player alive.”

He already is, you know.

The oldest major league player alive.

Tom Lasorda clinched this title Tuesday at the All-Star game, hollering at his team, falling on his butt, one of the few in the dugout who actually cared.

“Darn right I wanted the National League to win,” Lasorda says. “But everybody’s not like that anymore. It’s different now.”

Different for some. Not different for him.

Lasorda had flown to Seattle on Monday from Los Angeles.

Where he had flown a day earlier from a baseball clubhouse in Osaka, Japan.

He flies Saturday to a minor league clubhouse in Las Vegas.

Lasorda is busier than ever, and looks worse than ever.

Not coincidentally, he is happier than ever.

“This is what I love, this is what I feed off,” he says.

Judging by how his belly looked Tuesday, a relevant topic considering the heart problems that drove him from the dugout, that’s not all he’s feeding off.

“My weight doesn’t look good, I know,” Lasorda says. “But I’m making every effort to cut it down.”

The problem is this new job. Never quite sure what to do with their feisty uncle, this spring the Dodgers asked Lasorda to help out their sister team in the Japanese League, the Kintetsu Buffaloes in Osaka.

They surely never imagined he would fly there to help coach them for one week every month. Or that a fourth-place team would become a first-place team.

Or that Lasorda would get hooked, and become wiped out in the process.

He returns to his Fullerton home some nights this summer, eats dinner, makes plans to watch a movie, then falls asleep on the couch before wife Jo has finished cleaning the kitchen.

“It’s the Japanese League that’s really been tough on him,” Jo says. “He’ll do it this year because they asked him, but next year we’ll have to see what’s what.”

Lasorda is shouting now about Japan.

“My wife says, ‘How can you do that?’ I say, I get on a plane, somebody brings me dinner, I read books . . . how hard is that?”

But what about running around on a field with young players? Lasorda always said he did not want to die in a dugout like retired pitcher Don McMahon, who collapsed of a heart attack while walking off the Dodger Stadium mound after throwing early batting practice in 1987.

“That’s why I don’t do batting practice anymore,” Lasorda said. “What I do is not as hard as batting practice.”

What he does is harder.

What he does is, be Tommy.

In an outfield in Osaka, in a third-base coaching box in Seattle, wherever there is baseball, Lasorda considers it his job to explain how it used to be, how it is supposed to feel, why it has lasted forever.

What he does can sometimes be silly or self-serving or, on Tuesday night, downright frightening.

But what he does, being Tommy, he can change no sooner than he can change his name.

People are still concerned, you say.

“You wanna go with me to Vegas?” he says.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com.