Lasorda

And for something completely different… Tommy Lasorda has passed away. Growing up in California in the early 1980s the two managerial touchstones were Lasorda and Billy Martin (I’ll always remember Martin as an A rather than a Yankee), even though I was more of a fan of the Mauch-led Angels and the Robinson-led Giants. It was a remarkable degree of managerial continuity for a group of four teams (San Diego may have had a baseball franchise at the time; I don’t know and honestly no one cares) and established a certain set of expectations about what baseball managers did. As Ray Ratto notes, Lasorda’s way of doing things was done even before Lasorda was done, and we shall not again see his like.