I Live For This!: Baseball’s Last True Believer by Bill Plaschke with Tommy Lasorda

Category: 50 Books

7. I Live For This!: Baseball’s Last True Believer by Bill Plaschke with Tommy Lasorda

Okay, if you’re looking for a biography of Tommy Lasorda, just know that this isn’t really that kind of book. This book is about Tommy Lasorda, yes, but it’s not a typical baseball biography where they tell you all about growing up poor and making it to the Bigs and living the Baseball Life. Well, that stuff is in there, but not much. Mostly this books talked about what Tommy Lasorda does now and they’ve mixed in a few stories of when he was the manager of the Dodgers. Personally I was looking forward to reading about some late ’70s early ’80s baseball, you know, his heyday as a Dodger manager. There was just not a lot of that in here.

What is in here is the motivational speech circuit that Lasorda does today. This book tells you all about how he gives great speeches to ANY organization (some he does for free), and how he donates tons of money to charity. That is awesome. It really is. But also? For MOST of a book? It’s meh. So, he’s a great motivational speaker… he inspires ALL kinds of people, baseball players, firemen, people with heart problems, olympic athletes, fantastic. Personally, I want to hear more about his Championships and Fernandomania and junk like that. Maybe there’s already too many books on those things and they wanted to write kind of a “where are they now?” kinda book, and that’s cool. It’s just, I wish I had been warned. So now, baseball book fans, I’m warning you. This book completely paints Lasorda as a saint and it gets redundant.

Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE Tommy Lasorda. I think he was a great manager. He knows so much about baseball it’s not even funny. Tommy Lasorda is beyond baseball. Everyone knows who Tommy Lasorda is, even people who don’t know a thing about baseball. Case in point, I just called Laura (NOT a sportsfan of any kind. She rooted for Tom Petty at the last Super Bowl) and asked her if she knew who Tommy Lasorda was. She was all, “Kind of, but not really.”

“Could you pick him out of a line-up?”

“I dunno. You say Tommy Lasorda and I keep thinking of that commercial with Robert Loggia.”

“heh. That’s a GREAT commercial!”

“I know!”

“Okay, well, do you know what Tommy Lasorda did? His job?”

“Is this important?”

“It’s for the fiddy. So no, but I’m trying to make a point about how EVERYONE has heard of Tommy Lasorda.”

“Okay, I’m gonna say he’s either an actor or a sport… coach of some kind.”

skknt! I wish you could’ve heard her say “sport coach” because it was like she had never said the two words before.

“Perfect!” I crowed, “You said coach! You didn’t even say player that’s a huge deal!”

“It is?”

“Yes, it is. You said coach. That’s enough to make my point, plus he was in those Slim Fast commercials in the ’80s so maybe that’s why you had ‘actor’ in your head. You’re the bomb, thanks!”

So see? Tommy Lasorda is bigger than baseball. I believe that. He’s amazing. He’s charasmatic. He’s got moxie. But this book? It’s on the boring side. Sorry.

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