Book Review

I Live for This!
Bill Plaschke & Tommy Lasorda

As I kept reading through this book, I was impressed on what a nice guy Tommy Lasorda is. He was a tough guy as a baseball manager, at least sort of, but really he's a nice guy. He grew up poor, and really washed out as a ball player, but he was a really good manager. (A Hall of Fame manager, if you don't believe me...)

I remember him on TV from the Slim Fast commercials. The story goes that he had $80 thousand dollars riding on him losing 30 pounds, the money was for a home for some nuns. He stayed on the diet only long enough to win the bet, then ditched Slim Fast for good. The man is an eater. I think it was this book that got me thinking about Italian restaurants and spaghetti & meatballs...

The book talks about how nicely he treats everyone. At least everyone he likes. The secret of his success as a manager was to treat his players like his own sons, treating them very nice and making them feel special.

These days, he's back in the Dodgers organization, and he goes around the country doing speaking engagements. Some of them he does for pay, a bunch of them he does for free. (He figures the pay ones pave he way to go into schools, to police, that sort of thing.)

He's got a potty mouth, so he's not going to be featured at a BYU forum any time soon, but it's interesting to hear of the sort of things he does these days.

An interesting book...