Dodgers are able to win one more for the skipper

The Dodgers and Major League Baseball allowed Page 2 to sit in the dugout with No. 2 for his final days in Vero Beach.

--

VERO BEACH, Fla. -- Tom Lasorda puts in a good 57 years before James Loney is born, and who knows how many games in that time?

On Saturday, Lasorda wins another exhibition contest, and how many victories of all sorts is that in a Hall of Fame career that goes back to a time when a gallon of gasoline cost 15 cents?

But it’s his first in five tries at age 80, and maybe it doesn’t count for anything, but Loney recognizes what this week means to the old man, sneaks up from behind and pours a bucket of water down the No. 2 Dodger Blue jersey on Lasorda’s back.

Inside the clubhouse the hubbub is unmistakable, everyone riding high from victory, handshakes for the skipper and cries of “way to go, Tommy” filling the room.

He will always have the champagne from 1981 and then again 1988, the satisfaction of watching them drape gold medals around the necks of his USA baseball team, but now he also has his last hurrah.

INITIALLY, THOUGH, it doesn’t make sense why they are pouring water on Lasorda, who is 0-4 before Page 2 arrives to sit on the bench and take over.

Bench coach Bob Schaefer and designated grump Larry Bowa are old school and don’t like it when Billy Crystal picks up a bat for the Yankees, but hard to argue now with a difference maker.

We win, 6-1, and that’s even with Brad Penny batting in a game where we could have used the designated hitter. But he wants to see some live pitching before it all starts for real, and these are just some of the tough decisions a manager must make.

Penny singles and drops down a perfect bunt to advance runners to second and third. No reason for Joe Torre to hurry back from China.

LASORDA’S WIFE, Jo, tells him she doesn’t want him going to China, anyone else married to the guy for 100 years and looking for some peace and quiet maybe hiring a limo to make sure he doesn’t miss his plane.

But Jo’s a saint, and for the first time that Lasorda can remember, she’s worried about the toll such a trip might take on him. Then GM Ned Colletti calls and invites Lasorda to manage the Dodgers’ final games in Florida.

“And my wife tells me, ‘I got more than I prayed for,’ ” Lasorda says, home again in Vero Beach, the only home he’s known for the last 59 years at this time of the year. “I’m going to enjoy every minute of this.”

IT’S SATURDAY, and fans are waiting for him to get off the bus in Melbourne to get his autograph. He signs them all, even though there is free food inside. It takes him less than two minutes, though, from the time he enters the clubhouse to peel a banana and start dipping it in peanut butter.

Between bites, his team 0-4, he tells his players how to spell “win,” and he really does spell it out. He then yells, “And that doesn’t spell defeat,” and folks wonder why some managers are more successful than others.

He tells them he has 1,599 wins and needs only one more to hit 1,600, and urges them to get it for him, although exhibition games don’t go on his record. “They don’t know that,” Lasorda says.

Later, he will jump on them for not making more noise in the dugout, unhappy, he says, “that the only two guys you can hear yelling here are me and the beer man.”

Penny throws a pitch high and inside to a Nationals hitter with the name “Escobar” on his back. Escobar takes exception and Penny takes exception with Escobar’s exception.

Lasorda immediately starts in on Escobar, yelling at him to get back in the batter’s box, and “Who is going to try and hit a guy who can’t hit?”

Penny goes regular season on Escobar on the next pitch and strikes him out, a few innings later getting him to ground out.

“I don’t know how the ball stands it, Escobar,” Lasorda yells.

When an oversized Dmitri Young steps to the plate, Lasorda shouts, “You want a sandwich, Dmitri?” as if Lasorda would surrender one of his own.

HE’S GIVING it everything he has, up at dawn, speaking to the minor league pitchers, doing a reading at Mass, signing autographs for 200 fans -- getting stopped everywhere he goes.

It’s Sunday, the seventh inning and he’s trying to stay awake. The Dodgers go to pitcher Jason Johnson, who works in slow motion, and everyone else here is already sleeping.

“Is sleeping against the law?” Lasorda snaps. “Get me some runs, and maybe I’ll stay awake.”

The Dodgers are down to players with numbers but no names on their backs against Florida, and while they stage a ninth-inning rally under Lasorda’s insistence, they lose, 7-6.

Lasorda walks off, no, trudges off the field and threatens to go Kingman on anyone who makes light of the results. “No game is meaningless to me,” he says, and he’s now 1-5. Page 2 still 1-0.

LASORDA WILL speak to the crowd before today’s final Dodgers game in Vero Beach, and there’s a rumor he might get himself ejected. Why not? The fans have gotten everything else the guy has to offer.

A few days ago, former NBA broadcaster Mike Fratello, a Lasorda friend, is sitting in the stands. Someone behind him puts down a beer long enough to start berating Lasorda.

Fratello, the former coach, treats the fan like a referee. He tells him about the 1,000 people Lasorda has touched here before noon, the great ambassador surrounded at the intersection of Vin Scully Way and Don Drysdale Drive, a daily scene repeated here now for more than five decades.

Everyone has a good reason to ask for his time, his photo, his autograph. A New York fireman brings a T-shirt from his firehouse, while someone else puts a photo in his hands.

It’s a picture of himself, his right arm draped around a little girl in a Dodgers cap, and on the back it reads, “Ashley had the greatest day of her short life with the Dodgers. She died from leukemia one year later. Thank you, Tommy.”

--

T.J. Simers can be reached at t.j.simers@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Simers, go to latimes.com/simers.