Dodgers’ Tommy Lasorda’s Last Walk In Dodgertown
I’ve been a lifelong Dodger fan even though I never got to watch a Dodgers game in person. It wasn’t surprising that I ended up a Dodgers fan. When I was a little kid, I played baseball in the city league. And during those years in Cleveland, Mississippi I ended up on either a team named for the Dodgers or the Yankees. Kind of ironic. The only exception was my final year in Cleveland (1976) when I played for the Reds. The initial reason I chose the Dodgers as my favorite team at such a young age was that blue was my favorite color. Keep in mind, I was just a kid. Anyway, I grew up watching the Dodgers play fairly often on NBC’s Game Of The Week with Tommy Lasorda managing and my favorite player, Steve Garvey, playing first base (my position on the city league team). Vin Scully would call the game along with Joe Garagiola.
The Dodgers spent spring training in Vero Beach at a complex called Dodgertown each springtime for sixty years but this is the last spring training they will use the facility. Starting next year they will be training in Arizona trading the Grapefuit League for the Cactus League. Lasorda has been coming to Dodgertown with the Dodgers for 59 of those years. In the final game at Dodgertown, Lasorda was filling in as manager while current Dodger manager Joe Torre (I still am not used to reading that) was in Japan with some of the Dodgers playing exhibition games there. T.J. Simers of the L.A. Times has written a bittersweet article about that final game and what occurred spontaneously. Here’s a portion of that article:
And when it was all over, the players leaving after a 12-10 loss to the Houston Astros, Lasorda lingered at home plate.
As he began to walk down the right-field line, every step appearing to be a chore, something almost chilling on a hot day began to take shape.
Somewhere beyond first base he looked up, and he saw it, too, Dodgers players standing in a long line, two-by-two across from each other, bats raised above their heads as if they were crossing swords in honor of a military hero.
And as he walked down the tunnel, he shook each of their hands, a bunch of kids taking it upon themselves without a call to any of their agents to honor an 80-year-old man.
A few minutes later, after making it to the clubhouse, Lasorda cried.
“A lot of amazing things have happened to me in my life,” he said. “But what those players did for me with the bats is something I’ll never forget.”
They hugged Lasorda, and lined up to have him autograph their baseball caps with date and time.
I’ve lived in northwest Florida for the past 20 years and was always hoping to go down to Vero Beach to see the Dodgers at spring training and hopefully get Tommy Lasorda’s autograph on a baseball but I never had that pleasure always due to lack of money. But even though I live hundreds of miles away from Dodgertown, I will miss the Dodgers coming to Florida each spring.
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