Locked On Mariners - Daily Podcast On the Seattle Mariners - Remembering Tommy Lasorda (Part II)

Episode Date: January 14, 2021

Jason Hernandez is back with D.C. continuing to talk about the late, great Tommy Lasorda. Jason talks about the Dodger manager's run-ins with a couple of mascots, and also relays some personal interactions with Mr. Lasorda. They did not always talk about baseball; they would sometimes talked about one of their other favorite subjects: food. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to Locked-on Mariners, part of the Locked-on Podcast Network, your team every day. Here's your host, D.C. Lundberg. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Locked-on Mariners. I am not D.C. Lundberg. I'm, in fact, J.D. Hernandez. And with me is D.C. Lundberg, the actual host of Lockedon-on Mariner's. Don't forget to download, comment, rate, subscribe if you haven't already. And D.C., where can the fine folks listen to this show? Oh, I'll tell you, they can hear this show wherever podcasts can be heard on whichever device or whichever

way you want to listen. That could be Spotify, Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, whatever. Just make sure you subscribe to this podcast. And also, what else can you do, D.C.? That's about it. That's all I say at the intro. In fact, that's more than I say in the intro these days. So, yep, that was Jason Hernandez, former frequent guest here on Lockton Maritors. No, no, no, I'm kidding. That makes two now. That's all right. Jason, thanks for joining us. And the reason that he felt, uh, compelled to do that, ladies and gentlemen, but I'd already tried to record an intro twice, and it did not work so well. So it's third time's a charm.

Third time's a charm, and I didn't even have to do it, so thank you very much for that. On the previous episode, we had started talking about the life and career of the late great Tommy Lassort, a Hall of Fame manager for the Los Angeles Dodgers was there for multiple decades, as it were, and I had a feeling this was going to go into two parts, and it absolutely did, and Jason was just about to get on a wrong. roll. So I'm going to step aside here for just a little bit, ladies and gentlemen, and let Jason take it. Go for it, sir. Yeah. Of course you can chime in a little bit here and there. Sure. So where we left off, I talked about Tomlisota and his derisive pitching statistics,

as it were. Yeah, I mean, he liked to make fun of himself a little bit. But that wasn't my favorite story of Tomlisdora. Probably one of my favorite anecdotes that he says frequently, and it always sounds better when you hear from the man, is him talking about the incident in Philadelphia with the Philly Fanatic. That is always my favorite anecdote and for me to even hear that in person chef's kiss

all the time. That was his favorite story where he fought the fanatic and you know, Philly Fanatic had a little blow-up doll or I guess doll of Toma La Sorda

and Lassorta, you know, kind of beat him up. But that that one is probably my favorite story that he kind of said like on that little radio thing that I talked about but my favorite story that he went into detail about and I will remember this

to this day so time of Lassorta he came down to Ontario a bunch of times and I actually mentioned this on my Twitter so I'm going to read it as is on Twitter where time of Lassorta he would often come to Ontario to watch indoor soccer

because his godson Chris Leggio, he was a sponsor for the team that I've worked for at the clock and PA for them, the Ontario Fury. And Tommy was a huge fan of indoor soccer. He liked it. He liked the fast action. And Tommy would often come down

to the public address booth. I'd met him multiple times because he came down to field level a lot. And he liked to chat it up with the players and coaches and whatnot. And because I was in that public address booth and doing the PA a couple times, he'd come down. And one of those times, he even

even like padded me on the back and said, you're the voice, huh? I kind of joking around. Like, yeah. Nice. So we chatted up. And he loved telling stories. He really loved it. And one of the first times I met him, I told him, now, I believe Dodger Blue.

I told him that. And he just kind of patted me like, that's good kid. Like, yes. If I can get approval from Tumblr, that's worth it. Yes, it is. But, you know, I ate up those stories. and when I said he had great memories of Montreal, he had multiple stories about Montreal.

There's one famous incident that you, of course, might know about in Montreal. It actually sprung to mind when you were talking with the Philly Fanatic. I think I know what you're talking about, because it involves the Montreal Expos mascot, Yupy, and I'll let you take it from here. Hold on, hold on. I'm going to say the Montreal Canadiens current mascot, because I've got to bring a little bit of hockey into it.

But at the time, he was the Montreal Exposat. Les Expos, Yupi got ejected from the stadium because Yupi kept... So in Tommy's words, Tommy, this is according to Tommy Lus Order, by the way, that Yupi was banging on top of the dugout

way too much. And he could, he could even hear some of the little, like, some of the noises he was making. Something that he didn't always say. But when he told me this story, he said, I swear God, that guy in the suit

made so much bleepin noise and he was driving me freaking nuts and this was the middle of a very important race too at the time it was an important race and it was an important game this was in 89 so the Dodgers had just won the World Series

Montreal was kind of in it the Dodgers were kind of in it but Tommy was pissed off so much to the point and you know some of the video shows like you'd be just laying down on top of the dugout? No. According to Tommy, he was causing

a ruckus or a disturbance and making too much noise that apparently the cameras didn't catch or none of the microphones caught. So that's why Tommy Losota came out from the dugout and just stared at the mascot and just gave him like this mad dog

look. And according to Tommy, he said, I'd had enough I need to let the Empire's know to get his you know what. but out. Yep. And there's sad Yupy just leaving the stands and that was it. Oh, the colorful Tom of the sort of stories that he had.

But he talked about Montreal in several stories. He talked about the UPI incident. He talked about the comeback, the Blue Monday, where Rick Monday had a game-warning home run at Montreal to advance in the playoffs. He talked about that a lot. But he also talked about just the atmosphere of Montreal, how he said,

you know what, when that place was packed, some of those fans were the loudest SOBs ever, but the thing was, I couldn't talk back to them because those SOBs were talking in French, and I couldn't understand a freaking word they're saying. Oh, beautiful. I mean, that's his Tommy to a T. He would make

a story even more colorful, and those are the stories that I ate up, just listening to them. And the fact that he had multiple Montreal stories, that tells you that he either really loves it there, or he really hated it there. Either way, it was memorable.

That's for sure. Yes. We're just about running up on a break, which means it's time for the trivia corner. Today we'll do a hall pass, and this gentleman enjoyed a 22-year major league career in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. Just the later part of the 60s,

the early part of the 90s. He has a slash line of 289, 321, 408, 2,715 career hits, 498 doubles, 174 home runs, 1,2008 RBI. He's a one-time batting champion. He's led the league in doubles twice as well. He is an all-star, and he placed in the MVP voting one, two, three, four, five times. And he was a corner infielder and sometimes outfielder.

I want to mention that as well. Yes, no, or maybe on Hall of Fame, ladies and gentlemen, I'll tell you who this is after we tell you about betonline.ag. Let's see, NFL playoff season is in full swing at this time. The NHL is starting up pretty soon, and basketball's in full swing. There's only one place it has you covered in one place we trust, betonline.ag. Sign up today for a free account at betonline.orgie and use promo code locked on for your 50% welcome bonus. Don't sit on the sidelines any longer, gang, get in on the action.

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Of course I know who this is. We've mentioned him recently. On the very last show, as a matter of fact, I wanted to pick somebody with the strong Dodgers connection. Who is it? Some guy that's infamous in a certain world series, that would be Mr. Bill Buckner. It would be. And unfairly, that one play should not define his entire career, because those numbers speak for themselves.

He was an excellent Major League Baseball player and an excellent contact editor. Yeah, but again, he's always going to be known for that one error. Which is a shame. It is a damn shame. And that's another reason why I wanted to use Bill Buckner as a Hall Pass. One of these days, just to highlight his career numbers, because, I mean, you, I'm not going to go over him again. You can rewind and listen, but I'll say 289 career average, over 2,700 hits, almost 500 doubles. The man had an excellent career.

Yes, very much so. If you got a question or comment, please send it into Locked on. Mariner's at Gmail.com. I will reply to it on the air in an upcoming mailbag episode. Questions and comments on any subject are encouraged. Jokes are encouraged. Silly questions are encouraged. Those are my favorites, by the way.

Send them all into Lockdown Mariners at Gmail.com. Just please keep them family appropriate. We will return. Lockdown Mariners will be back after this word from Rock Auto. Rockotto.com is a family business gang serving auto parts customers online for 20 years. Go to rockato.com to shop for auto parts from 100. of manufacturers, whether it's for your daily driver or for your classic, get everything you need in a few easy clicks delivered directly to your door. The rockado.com catalog is unique

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Here once again is your host, D.C. Lundberg. Yes, indeed. Thank you, J.M. Before we get back to Mr. Lasota, I want to invite all of to join Walking Baseball Encyclopedia, Paul Francis Sullivan, more affectionately known as Sully, join him every day on Lockdown MLB for a unique look at the majors, both past and present, featuring exciting guest interviews, routine check-ins from the Locked-on MLB network's team of local experts,

including myself. I was on about a week or a half ago, an insightful analysis of the day's biggest stories. Locked on MLB is the single best daily source for baseball. talk. Subscribe today wherever you get your podcasts. D.C. Lundberg back here with Locked-on Anaheim Ducks host, Jason Hernandez, talking about the late great Tommy Lassorta. He shared multiple stories from Mr. Lassorta. One thing that, I don't know why this sticks out in my head, Jason, as it does, and it's a very small thing, but I think

it spoke lengths about what Tommy Lsorta felt about the Dodgers during Hideo Nomo's rookie season or just after his rookie season. Hideo Nomo didn't speak in any English. is a video clip of Tommy Lasorda teaching Nomo to say, I bleed Dodger Blue. Yeah, it's one of my favorites. Mine too. I'm going to let you go once again, if you don't mind, since you're

the Dodgers guy and you've met Mr. Lassorda on multiple occasions, so the floor is yours once again, sir. Yeah, I was just going to chime in very quickly and say, you know, Tomlisota talked about Montreal a lot. One of my favorite profanity-laced stories, and I'm not going to repeat much of it here, but I will just say he had fond memories of the time where he pitched

and also coached and managed in one game. You're asking how the hell did that happen? He was pitching for the Montreal Royals. This was towards the end of his career. He was barely hanging on playing in the minors. He pitched. And then his manager got ejected

and had some very colorful words that I cannot repeat here. And then I guess someone else got ejected. So Tommy had to do it all. That day. And I'm just going to say there was a lot of profanity in that story. But I ended up, and he was very happy to share it. Yeah. But something else that he loved to talk about, and I did mention this on my post because, you know, there's so many stories.

And I can't even get to all of them because there's just so many. But he also loved talking about food. He was such a foodie. As of, you know, I'm a huge food. you've seen me eat at baseball games. You know this. A lot. Yep.

On my ballpark tour. How much did I eat during that ballpark tour, D.C.? Many, many grasshoppers. Oh, a lot. Oh, but the Ivars, like, I ate everything up. No, in particular, during the ballpark tour, when I had, like, three trips and two beers and a lot of food, it was a lot. So Tommy loved talking Italian food.

and that was actually like an entire conversation him and I had. Oh, beautiful. Because, and the reason for this is because there was an Italian restaurant that I liked going to up in the high desert up in Victorville. And I said, yeah, this family knows what they're doing. They have the authentic music. They use the capers properly in some of their dishes. And he said, oh, you know what?

Like, I got to be honest, being here in Southern California, you're kind of lucky because there's some actually good Italian places, but if he go to a place, he actually mentioned, I think he mentioned Denver as being a place that didn't have a whole lot of quality Italian, and he didn't like going there. Really?

Yeah. It's Tommy LaSorda. He loves specific kind of food. If there's a place that he doesn't like to go, it's going to be up to him. But he loved, loved going to San Diego. He said two of his favorite road cities for San Diego and New York. Obviously, New York having some of the best Italian food ever, and I'll agree with him on that.

In fact, my favorite pizza place of all time closed last year, unfortunately, which was in Hill's Kitchen. Sad about that. Devastated. But he's a man that loves his pizza. He loves his lasagna. He loves his pasta. We just, you know, talk stories. and, you know, kind of gave me, like, a little tip on, like, how to properly prepare something.

So, like, damn, this is so cool. Like, I'm actually talking and talking to some of the sort of, like, sharing food stories. This is awesome. I wish he would have released a cookbook. That's not a joke. I wish he would have released a cookbook. He has his tritoria at Dodger Stadium, and he approves of all the dishes there for what it's worth. So there's that.

That's awesome. And he has had, like, some, like, cooking quotes here. Like, he's talked about it somewhat, but not enough. In my opinion, I mean, if you're going to talk to someone about Italian food, he's going to be one of those guys. And I think that's what endeared me to him was, you know, like you'd have all these people gushing in this sense, like, oh, it's Tommy Litton, let's talk baseball.

And then me, because I'd met him before, like, what do you want to talk about? Let's talk about food. Like, I'm game for that. Like, I can talk about food all day. and when I told him that I was a foodie he said oh have you tried this place and this was like damn it Tommy like I love my food but I haven't been to place A

and place me there was one place that he mentioned that I had been to and that was it and he said oh you're missing out you gotta try this so I did I eventually tried a couple more places that he luckily told me about so that's just the kind of man that he was I mean he was very very versatile in his stories.

It wasn't just about baseball. He talked about other sports, talk about food. I mean, that was one of his favorite things that he liked to talk about. We don't hear enough about. We don't hear enough about

the non-baseball stuff. Yeah, that's kind of good to highlight on that for this particular episode, quite honestly. Yeah, I mean, it's stuff outside of the realm of baseball that he also wanted to talk about.

Yeah, and I was going to mention a couple other baseball-related stories. I'm not going to now. I'm just going to let you go. Yeah, because there's so much more Tommy. I mean, yes, he was with the Dodgers for 70 plus years, but, you know, he had his Italian food. He apparently had steak in a couple of restaurants. He also has a winery. Oh, does he?

Something else that doesn't get talked about enough because you know me, DC. You know I love my wine. I think we talked about that's in one of your previous appearances. You can go in my cupboard right now, and I have about nine different types of wine, folks. Nine different types. One for each inning. Hey, there it is. I might try. No, I'm not going to try that. No, I might. Nah. Well, if I drink it at home and I watch nine innings on TV, that's fine. I have had the lasota wine. It's been around for a long time. It is delicious. I might try to look to get some more.

So, yeah. And he's really good. Oh, that's another story. Like another little thing. he knows how to pair his wine and his food. By the way, he was always a red wine kind of guy. Him and you be 40. Yeah, reds wine. Anyway. Sorry. Yeah, I do like specific kinds of red wine.

I do like, like, I actually told him like, yeah, I like this tempera neom mix. I like this kind of mix. So I think he was kind of surprised as far as me personally that he wanted to talk about something other than baseball, which I think is great. Yeah. Wine and food. Who knew?

Anything else, sir? I just want to say that, you know, I had the privilege and honor of meeting him several times, and every time was more fun than the last. And I got to take several, like, he was always up with taking a picture with me. We have maybe like eight or nine pictures, and someone pointed this out to me,

and I just kind of laugh at this. Or you see a lot of pictures of Tommy and he looks like he's tired or kind of scowling. And two people have pointed out, man, you got lucky. You got a picture of him with like a full smile on your picture. Like, yeah, I kind of do. That might have been a picture after we talked about food or something like that. Nice. That would get him that kind of smile.

Yeah. But Tommy, I love talking to you. I miss you. Yeah. Thank you for the stories. That's all I can say. Thank you for the memories, the stories. I cannot forget them.

And I cannot thank him enough for those stories. And I'm glad I could share them with you and the audience. Well, I'm very happy that you were able to do that, Jason. And before you wrap a nice little bowl, I know you were in the process of doing that. But I want to say that in terms of getting pictures in which he looked like he was tired or scowling, he wasn't a sullen individual.

He wasn't a grumpy person. He tended to get tired towards the later part. of these personal appearances. That's what the issue was. And as a man who is not in the best physical shape myself, I can understand that. But it wasn't an attitude

thing with him. It was stamina. Jason, you can go ahead and wrap it up now if you'd like to. Yeah, but apparently talking about food was the secret sauce there. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But I just wanted to get it out there that he wasn't a grumpy guy or anything like that. I just wanted to kind of, yeah. Anyway, so to wrap up, once again, thank you,

Tommy and you could hear my hockey podcast, which is Locked-on Anaheim Ducks on the Locked-on Podcast Network. The Twitter for that is at L-O-U-U-Ux, and my personal Twitter is Stimpy J-D. And if you look at my personal Twitter, there's a great picture with me and Tommy. And in fact, I'm going to do this right now. I'm going to make that my pinned tweet because, I mean, my other pinned tweet was about the trash gross. I mean the Astros.

I'm like, ah, you know what? Let's change it up a bit. Let's change it up. The Dodgers won the World Series and Tommy was part of it. Absolutely, yes. And I love Tommy very much. Yeah, very glad to have done that.

Also, you can hear my podcast and this podcast, Locked on Mariners, via Apple Podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever podcasts can be heard. And make sure to download, rate, and subscribe if you haven't already. if you really like the podcast, make sure to subscribe. If you didn't like the podcast, we're locked on sharks, and we curse a lot. We swear. Nice. One final thing that just popped into my head.

I said I wasn't going to mention any baseball stories, but there's a Mariners story involving Tommy the Sorda. At the 2001 All-Star game, and it has to do with Vladimir Guerrero. We're running out of time, so I'm not going to say the full story. I think you guys out there know what I'm talking about anyway. but look up the YouTube video. It's one of the more memorable moments of that All-Star game when Tommy's Sort of was coaching third base. Yes, Tommy's gymnastics.

Sorry, Tommy. That's right. When I was talking with my mother the day after Tommy of the sort of passed, that's what immediately sprung into her mind. For me, it was the personal stories, obviously. Oh, of course, because you had the pleasure of meeting him and speaking with him about things other than baseball. And I did not have the opportunity to meet him.

But we're past time, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much again, Jason Hernandez. He's already told you where you can find him. Please remember to download, rate, and subscribe to this program and his. Look for us on any podcasting app that you can happen to think of. Probably mailbag time next time, guys. And remember Lockdown Mariners at gmail.com is a place to send those messages. Thank you for listening.

Tommy Lassorta. Thank you for everything. This is Joey Martin for Locked-on Mariners, part of the Locked-on Podcast Network.