Free 100 Things Dodgers Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die by Jon Weisman

boob holding his job only because of the incredible patience or shortsightedness of the Dodger front office.” Yet Alston not only survived, he won three pennants and two World Series in the next four seasons.
    After the retirement of Sandy Koufax following the 1966 season, however, the best of times were over for Alston. In his 10 remaining seasons, the Dodgers made the postseason once.
    In retrospect, Alston was anything but an emotionless presence with the Dodgers. Though he was renowned for not showing up his players in public, stories of fierce confrontations with his players, including Jackie Robinson and Don Newcombe, have become part of the backroom Alston legend. A chapter could be written on the Robinson-Alston dynamic, which began with Robinson’s dim view of Alston’s savvy and culminated with Alston’s benching of the 36-year-old Robinson for Game 7 of the 1955 World Series. If there’s a quintessential Alston story, it’s the tale of him challenging any and all members of the ’63 Dodgers to step off the team bus and fight him.
    Alston’s successor, Tommy Lasorda, quickly gained his reputation as the piss-and-vinegar manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, but Alston, a man whose major league career was limited to one single strikeout, still burned. He may have burned on a low flame, but he burned.
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16. The Two Tommys
    The Dodgers’ biggest cheerleader had the mouth of a sailor. He was a Dodgers Blue carnival barker who could give you the greatest show on earth, even as his insides churned like a freight train.
    It is no disservice to Tommy Lasorda to point out that he, like Walter Alston before him, was more coiled than his popular image (in this case, his famous exuberance) would suggest. Lasorda was born with aggression. In front of a camera, where the kids or the True Blue fans might see him, he was just a big ol’ bear. In more private arenas, he was, well, a big old bear. Either way, he channeled that agita into crazy, indelible memories for the Dodgers, and you can hardly talk about the team without talking about him.
    Lasorda spoiled for fights long before he won 1,599 regular season games, eight division titles, four league pennants, and two World Series as a Dodgers manager from the end of 1976 through the middle of 1996. After Wally Moon slashed Lasorda’s leg in a home-plate collision during his first major league start with Brooklyn (as Lasorda wrote with David Fisher in The Artful Dodger ), Lasorda had to be dragged away from staying in the game to pitch. Later with the Kansas City A’s, Lasorda decided he was going to throw at every batter he saw in retaliation for the way New York Yankee pitcher Tom Sturdivant was knocking his teammates down—and he did, until Billy Martin charged out for a fight.
    The methods at times might have bordered on madness, but never was there a doubt—push; push himself, push the team, push the sport. Fatigue and fear were irrelevant. Twenty years passed between Lasorda’s last major league game as a pitcher and his first major league game as a manager. Fight and spirit together got him there; one without the other would have stranded him.
    That’s how a man who was all business when it came to winning could also find time to dress Don Rickles up in a Dodgers uniform and send him out to the mound to pull Elias Sosa from a game after the Dodgers had clinched the NL West title in Lasorda’s first season. If Lasorda heard a kid say he was a fan of another team, he could proselytize on behalf the Dodgers until heaven’s blue gates opened. If Lasorda heard a reporter ask what he thought of Dave Kingman’s three-homer performance, he could profanitize until the Apocalypse.
    And so, as appealingly or menacingly cocksure Lasorda could be at times, when he asked his players for that something extra, they couldn’t argue that he wasn’t giving it himself. When it came to winning, you