The Ambassador

The man who made Dodger Blue a rallying cry is changing colors this month. Tommy Lasorda will be adding red and white to his mix.

As manager of the U.S. Olympic baseball team, and of the first such team to field pro players--in this case, all minor leaguers--Lasorda will be more star-spangled than Francis Scott Key.

This is a man who believes the rallying cry comes before the rally, a man who has sold the concept to fans and players alike--that talking Dodger Blue, swearing allegiance to it and hating all that isn’t part of it will somehow produce game-winning singles in the ninth inning.

Australia has been hit by plenty of powerful storms over the years, but it may not be quite ready for Hurricane Tommy and his All-American gusto.

“I’ve never been to Australia before,” Lasorda said. “Been invited about eight times, but I never went. It was just too far. But when my country asks me, that’s a whole different story. I’d fly to the moon for my country.”

Lasorda will even miss celebrating his 73rd birthday at home, but he will make that day, Sept. 22, into a customized celebration of the Stars and Stripes.

“We play Italy that day,” Lasorda said. “Isn’t that ironic. The country that gave my father life. The father that brought me and my four brothers into this world and sat around at the kitchen table and told us, in his broken English, how proud we boys should be of being here and of being American. We’ll give Italy a present that night, for my birthday. We’ll score 20 runs on ‘em.”

Lasorda is much more than just gusto. He managed the Dodgers for 20 years, and in those 20 years won two World Series championships, four National League pennants and eight division titles. In his 51st year with the Dodger organization, the team’s senior vice president is a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame and is a nationally renowned public speaker and fund-raiser. Three universities have awarded him honorary degrees and there is a street named after him in Vero Beach, Fla., home of the Dodgers’ spring training complex.

He retired as Dodger manager in the middle of the last Summer Olympics, July 29, 1996, and those Dodger fans who were detractors then can now, in light of what has happened since, look back on the Lasorda years as the good old days.

Lasorda has filled his life since that midsummer departure in ’96 with player-personnel duties, scouting and instructional league work and every sort of public relations opportunity imaginable. But this Olympic chance has really got him back in stride, not to mention back on the field, which he still loves best.

“So much of this is going to be a surprise to me,” he said during a recent interview. “I couldn’t tell you the starters now. I’m gonna have a hell of a time just learning all their names. But I’ll tell you this: The committee [USA Baseball] picked players that can play now. I don’t have any time to develop people. We have to win now.

“I’ll tell you another thing: This team isn’t gonna be like those hockey players. We will represent this country with the highest degree of dignity.”

Some members of the U.S. hockey team, individuals who remain unnamed today, tore up portions of their living quarters after a loss at the ’98 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan. That became an international incident, still not totally healed, for USA Hockey and the NHL.

Hockey was conducting a similar Olympic experiment, allowing pro players in a team sport that had long been contested by amateurs. The NHL actually shut down a portion of its season so its players could compete for their countries, then took a big public-relations hit when the U.S. team acted more like amateurs than the real amateurs.

Major league baseball is less likely to do anything as drastic to its season, but it also likes playing a role in the Olympics, and that made the selection of the popular Lasorda a natural step. Others reportedly in the running were all former major league managers: Terry Collins, one season removed from the Angels, plus Ray Miller and Jim Lefebvre. Lasorda’s Hall of Fame credentials, as well as a long-standing commitment to the international baseball movement by former Dodger owner Peter O’Malley, made the choice by major league baseball’s Sandy Alderson, Bob Watson and Bill Bavasi a fairly logical, easy one.

Until recently, the Olympic movement never quite knew what it wanted to do with baseball. For eight Olympics, the game was a demonstration sport. That ended in 1956 at Melbourne, and baseball was left out of the Games until O’Malley and others began a heavy push for it once the ’84 Olympics were awarded to Los Angeles. It was a demonstration sport then and was again in ’88 at Seoul, before finally becoming a full-medal sport in ’92 at Barcelona. But the United States and other countries sent teams of college and amateur players to Barcelona and Atlanta in ’96.

Now, the Olympic movement, apparently in the final stages of opening the doors to all categories of athletes, could conceivably play host to the New York Yankees one of these years. That would be within Olympic rules, if certainly not within the comfort zones of Bud Selig and George Steinbrenner.

In fact, Lasorda has quite a task. His roster is sprinkled with 28 players whose name identification is, well, almost nil.

There had been some talk of sprinkling this team of youngsters with a veteran or two, players who had recently retired from the big leagues. Names such as Terry Steinbach, Tim Raines and Wade Boggs were kicked around by Lasorda and the selection trio of Alderson, Watson and Bavasi. But only Steinbach came close, and when he hurt himself in a water-skiing accident, Lasorda’s role became part manager, part nursemaid.

Pat Borders, the most valuable player of the 1992 World Series for Toronto, is this team’s best-known player. But Borders is 37 and nowhere near the majors now, catching for the minor-league Durham, N.C., team in the Tampa Bay Devil Rays’ organization.

At the other end of the spectrum is Sean Burroughs, the former Long Beach Little League World Series phenom of the early 1990s, who will turn 20 on Tuesday. Five days later, when the team opens against Japan, he could very well be a starter. Or, he could be dropped to the alternate list.

Lasorda had his first look at his team Sept. 2 in a workout in San Diego. But there was as much inspiration as there was perspiration at that event. The players were addressed by phone by Ted Williams and then got a visit from Tony Gwynn. Their message was about the same: You are lucky to be representing your country. Go do it well.

Hours after the workout, Lasorda and the team flew to Australia, where they began a series of exhibition games on Australia’s Gold Coast, two hours north of Sydney. From those games, Lasorda will pick a team.

“We’ll get everything we can out of them,” said Lasorda, whose “we” also refers to his main assistant coaches, both with Dodger backgrounds. They are pitching coach Phil Regan and batting instructor Reggie Smith, both of whom were with last year’s U.S. Pan American Games team that was the first USA Baseball team that included pro players. That team lost in the final to Cuba, the probable favorite for the gold medal in Sydney, but qualified for a spot in the Olympics with its second-place finish.

“We’ll scratch and scramble, manufacture some runs,” Lasorda said. “That’s my style.”

His style is also motivational, and for those who don’t believe his red, white and blue pep talks won’t make this USA team a factor in the race for an Olympic medal, listen to none other than former major league star Joe Morgan, who said:

“Just watch. Before he is done with these kids, Lasorda will have them believing they are the 1927 Yankees.”

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IN TODAY’S PAPER

A 16-page preview section for the Summer Games