Monday was the 35th anniversary of when Tommy Lasorda went after the Phillie Phanatic
Dodgers pitchers John Tudor and Tim Crews combined on a seven-hit shutout 35 years ago Monday in Philadelphia, but LA manager Tommy Lasorda was steamed during the game.
The details of the Dodgers’ 5-0 win over the Phillies that day are inconsequential, but many remember what happened ahead of the sixth inning.
Call it the Phillie Phanatic-Tommy Lasorda Brouhaha.
The Phillies’ mascot got under the skin of Lasorda, who came out of the dugout to put an end to the Phanatic’s shenanigans.
The Phanatic had a Lasorda dummy — a full Dodgers uniform, including the manager’s jersey — and was on the field with it. Lasorda swiped the Phanatic’s ATV, and when the mascot went to retrieve it, the Dodgers manager ran to get the stuffed jersey.
Lasorda then used the dummy to hit the Phanatic.
It was comedy gold.
That was no act by Lasorda, who died in 2021. He was genuinely upset.
“I was always upset about him always taking my shirt and putting it on some dummy and then running over it,” Lasorda told an interview in 2015, per The Score. “I didn’t particularly like that and I told him. I said, ‘I don’t want you to do that anymore.’
“The next time I saw him he still put my shirt on so I went after him and I bopped him down a little bit and I said, ‘if there weren’t all these people here I’d really rip ya.’”
Lasorda wasn’t a fan of mascots in general. He once had the Montreal Expos mascot ejected because it was on the Dodgers dugout during a game.
