Tommy Lasorda is the best. Colorful, benevolent, profane, opinionated, egotistical, encouraging, proud, patriotic, loyal, vengeful, humorous, emotional, devoted, humble. Look up all the adjectives...Tommy carries some of those traits somewhere in that humongous personality of his. Something about him always I admired. Perhaps it was his upbringing in Norristown, PA, where he lived a hard life and went after his baseball dream and achieved it. Maybe it was the work ethic that his parents instilled in him. Similar to what my folks did. Maybe it was his patriotism to his country. Or that he was a Boy Scout like me. Perhaps it was because his mom made him a home cooked meal every night and that his family was united and sat down and broke bread every night...just like I experienced.
A lot about him I found appealing. Much of his dark side, I didn’t approve of, but I recognized his imperfections. And I probably have far more than he. Perhaps I am a bit jealous of his spunk, fortitude and appeal. i wish I had his charisma. I wish I could get up and light up a room at a moments notice and that I had the public speaking charm and skills that he has. I mean seriously, how many of us could be called on to give the eulogy at a funeral of a man you barely knew? Well Tommy did...and then brought down the house in the process.
I have met him casually about a dozen times. I had a personal appointment with him once. If he were to run into me on the street, he wouldn’t know me from Adam. That doesn’t matter to me. I was able to have a good ten minute conversation with him once, and he was extremely polite and giving of his time. I’ve seen him moody and irritable and I’ve seen him very polite and generous. As a field manager, I disagreed with a lot of his decision making, but I give him his props for some of the gut instinct decisions that he made during his career that turned out right. (Mike Davis swinging away on a 3-0 count in game 5 of the '88 World Series was pure genious).
So anyway. As a lifelong Dodger fan whose first baseball memory was watching on TV the Roseboro-Marichal incident at Candlestick as a 4 year old boy, later witnessing much of the ’74 pennant winning season first hand as a Cannon Country Left Field Pvilion attendee to the right of Ms. Francis Friedman, as the winning recipient of the “Truest of the Blue” essay contest prize in ’99, to my present day followings of the Dodgers from afar in the middle of Giant country, I start this blog. My opinions and musings about the Dodgers past and present and my life in general as it pertains to my little corner of the world.
Why the blog title? Well, as an attention getter I suppose. Jim Healy ran the Lasorda clip regarding Kingman’s 3 home run day in ’78 against the blue over and over again. We always got a chuckle out of it. I’m sure that Tommy isn’t proud of that moment of his life, but then again, I think deep down...he probably laughs about it too in private.
So welcome to OpionofKingmansPerformance.blogsspot.com
I hope this blog turns out to be a regular stop to many a Dodger fan and baseball fan in general.
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