Lasorda Manages to Do a Lot of Pitching

Which member of the world champion Los Angeles Dodgers throws the best pitch?

On the mound, probably Orel Hershiser. Off the mound, however, the best paid pitch man may be Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda. In fact, Hollywood celebrity agents estimate that Lasorda pulled in about $300,000 last year in product endorsement fees.

Now that the Dodgers have won the World Series, “he’ll probably earn on one deal what he made all last year,” said Noreen Jenney, president of Celebrity Endorsement Network of Woodland Hills.

Not that Lasorda always comes up a winner. In fact, until the final World Series game last Thursday, Walt Disney Co. officials were negotiating with representatives for both Lasorda and Hershiser. These negotiations concerned which would do the now-familiar “I’m going to Disneyland,” TV commercial, said Lasorda’s personal attorney, Zack Samuels, of the Los Angeles law firm Dolman & Samuels.

In the end, Disney Chairman Michael Eisner elected to go with Hershiser.

But since the World Series began, “my phone hasn’t stopped ringing” with offers for Lasorda, said Samuels. He said Lasorda is close to signing commercial deals with several food companies.

Lasorda has advertisements running for Rolaids antacid tablets, Entenmann’s baked goods, Hattie’s salad dressing, American Federal Savings and Empire State Bank of America. But Samuels insists that Lasorda is not overexposed. “If that was a problem,” he said, “the advertisers wouldn’t keep calling.”

Indeed, in recent years, Lasorda has also done ads for Diet Coke, Yoplait yogurt, Nissan, Chicago Bros. frozen pizza, Colgate shaving cream, Citibank, and Natural Light beer from Budweiser. But Lasorda stopped doing the Budweiser ads several years ago, although Samuels declined to say why. This, even though Lasorda states in “The Artful Dodger,” his 1985 autobiography: “One product I believe in and have tried, and tried again just to make sure I believed in it, was Natural light beer from Budweiser.”