I Live for This!; Baseball's Last True Believer

xiv, [2], 236, [4] pages. Illustrations. Tommy Lasorda's Managerial Record. Index. William Paul Plaschke (born September 6, 1958, in Louisville, Kentucky) is an American sports journalist who has written for the Los Angeles Times since 1987. In 1980, he received a bachelor's degree in mass communications from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where he was the sports editor for the school's paper, the Alestle. Before joining the Los Angeles Times, he worked as a reporter in Fort Lauderdale and Seattle. After joining the Times, he mainly covered the Los Angeles Dodgers. He became a columnist in 1996. Plaschke is a member of the Baseball Writers' Association of America and the Professional Football Writers Association. He is also a regular panel member of ESPN's sports-themed debate show, Around the Horn. Fellow panelist and Denver Post columnist and author Woody Paige often refers to him as "Reverend Bill." Plaschke has been named National Sports Columnist of the Year by the Associated Press four times. He has written two books: I Live for This!: Baseball's Last True Believer (with Tommy Lasorda) (2009), and Paradise Found: A High School Football Team's Rise from the Ashes (2021), about how a high school football team inspired the people of Paradise, California after the town was virtually destroyed in a wildfire. Thomas Charles Lasorda (September 22, 1927 - January 7, 2021) was an American professional baseball pitcher and manager. He managed the Los Angeles Dodgers of Major League Baseball (MLB) from 1976 through 1996. He was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame as a manager in 1997. Lasorda played in MLB for the Dodgers in 1954 and 1955 and for the Kansas City Athletics in 1956. He coached for the Dodgers from 1973 through 1976 before taking over as manager. Lasorda won two World Series championships as manager of the Dodgers and was named the Manager of the Year of the National League (NL) twice. His uniform number 2 was retired by the Dodgers. During his tenure with the Bears, Lasorda was profoundly influenced by Denver manager Ralph Houk, who became Lasorda's role model for a major league manager. "Ralph taught me that if you treat players like human beings, they will play like Superman," he told Bill Plaschke in the biography I Live for This: Baseball's Last True Believer. "He taught me how a pat on a shoulder can be just as important as a kick in the butt." Lasorda was named vice president of the Dodgers upon his retirement from managing in 1996. On June 22, 1998, he became interim General Manager upon the firing of Fred Claire. After the season, he helped find a permanent replacement for Claire and was made senior vice president of the Dodgers. Lasorda came out of retirement to manage the U.S. national team at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia. He led the Americans to the gold medal, beating favored Cuba, which had won the gold medal at the prior two Olympics. In doing so, he became the first manager to win a World Series championship and lead a team to Olympic gold. An award-winning sportswriter shows us one of baseball's most famous and enduring legends as we've never seen him before, revealing the secrets of his amazing, unlikely success and his unvarnished opinions on the state of the game. Tommy Lasorda is perhaps baseball's most famous and popular figure. At seventy-nine, after twenty years of managing and fifty-seven years with one franchise, this Hall of Famer still suits up in Dodger Blue every day. He also keeps a travel schedule that would dizzy the most frequent of frequent fliers. The embodiment of the American dream, Lasorda went from a scrawny, overlooked Italian kid of average ability to become one of the world's most recognizable baseball faces. And he fought for it every step of the way. In I Live for This Bill Plaschke strips the veneer from one of baseball's last living legends to show how grit and determination really can transform a life. We think we know this jovia.…