Tommy Lasorda

Thomas Charles Lasorda was born in 1927 in Norris-town, Pennsylvania, one of five sons of immigrants from Italy. Growing up, Lasorda's passion was baseball. In particular, he was inspired by the great players of the day. "They were my heroes," he told Woody Woodburn of the Denver Rocky Mountain News many years later. "I knew them all by their names, their middle names, their batting averages." Lasorda's greatest dream was to become a major league pitcher. A dream which he would later realize, albeit briefly. "My father used to say to me," he told Woodburn, "If you studied in school as hard as you do those batting averages you'd be a professor at Yale one day."

After serving in the U. S. Army for a year, from 1946 to 1947, Lasorda began his career in baseball as a minor league pitcher. In 1948, he set a Canadian-American League record for number of strikeouts in a single game; while pitching for the Schenectady Blue Jays in a 15-inning game against the Amsterdam Rugmakers, he struck out 25 batters. To top it off, during that same game, he hit the winning runner home. Around this time, Lasorda also married his wife, Jo.