Anne Keene, Tommy Lasorda and Baseball Through Generations

The first thing that she noticed was his pristine white Los Angeles Dodgers polo.

Anne Keene knew that Tommy Lasorda, 92, had spent his life in uniform. The World War II veteran and Hall of Fame Dodgers manager had always liked the way that his uniform allowed him to represent something bigger than himself everywhere he went.

This meeting with Keene at a Starbucks in Fullerton, California, was no exception. “Mr. Dodger” held the door, shook everyone’s hand, and sat down with his afternoon coffee. A total gentleman, Keene wrote.

Having spent the last six years researching baseball players who had paused their careers to serve in World War II, Keene discovered a little-known history of men who traded in their pinstripes to wear the stars and stripes.

It’s a sacrifice that led Keene to admire Lasorda’s generation, which also includes her late father, Jim Raugh. Keene’s discovery of his scrapbook revealed that he had been the batboy and mascot for “The Cloudbuster Nine,” a team of professional players who kept their skills sharp while training to become Naval fighter pilots in the Pacific.

This personal connection, Keene said, led her to approach the story with dignity and emotion. When she tried to learn more about the team, she found that existing research was just as incomplete as the sporadic reporting that had been done in the 1940s. She knew that her book would be about more than baseball – it studied the patriotism of a generation.

That afternoon in Fullerton, this generational divide was reinforced. While Keene was present in the moment, Lasorda pointed out that all of the kids in the coffee shop had their heads buried in their cell phones.

“Sometimes they don’t even really know what day it is,” Lasorda told Keene. “When I was their age, I got up every day and knew exactly where I had to be.”

For Lasorda, that meant waking up early to sell newspapers in order to support his family in Norristown, Pennsylvania. He balanced this work with his budding baseball career. Just months after his major league debut in 1945, he joined the Army at age 18. In his two years of service, Lasorda pitched during any spare time he had.

Stories like these, drawn out by something as impromptu as kids on their phones, remind Keene why she meets her interview subjects face-to-face.

“To look at a human being in the eye,” Keene said, “makes a story completely fly off the page.”