Friday, March 28, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.
In springs past, Tommy Lasorda would hit fungoes every March at Dodgertown in Vero Beach, Fla., and encourage young baseball players to give everything they had to the game he loves so much.
Today, he's encouraging businessmen to give everything they have to the workplaces that they should love just as much.
Lasorda, the 20-year manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers who retired last season when he was slowed by a heart attack, was the cleanup hitter in the final day of Pizza Expo '97, an annual gathering of more than 4,000 entrepreneurs in the $30 billion-a-year pizza industry.
"How much are you willing to pay to reach that next level of success?" Lasorda asked attendees of the breakfast for the last day of the four-day show at the Las Vegas Convention Center. He delivered it as a question to the crowd, but acknowledged it as a question he has asked his players as well as himself.
Lasorda, who has spent 47 years with the Dodger organization, was a grand slam with the pizza-making crowd with his anecdotes about his experiences around Major League Baseball and inspired them with his example of self-confidence, drive and loyalty.
"You've got to work harder and be better prepared than your opponent," Lasorda said. "You've got to love what you do and have pride in the organization you represent."
No stranger to Italian eateries across the nation, Lasorda also joked that members of his audience were prime candidates for another product he has endorsed -- the Slim-Fast diet.
No Las Vegas buffet could match the spread offered on the trade show at the Pizza Expo, a collection of about 800 vendors offering the latest in pizza-making equipment, accessories and ingredients.
There were cheeses, sauces, meats and vegetables; peels, pans, rotisseries and ovens; arcade attractions, delivery boxes, insurance agents (to write policies for pizza deliverers) and order control systems.
Darrell Janis of Born in America Restaurant and Pizza Kitchen in Branford, Conn., won a $1,000 prize for contributing a new blend of pizza toppings in the Pizza Festiva International Recipe Contest. His New Full House Pizza -- topped with grilled Portabella mushrooms, duck meat, chorizo sausage, roasted garlic, Wisconsin romano, mozzarella and smoked gouda cheeses -- was judged Pizza of the Year by his peers.
Other high-placing recipes included a seafood pizza offering a Cajun-spiced seafood mixture of shrimp, crawfish and crabmeat as well as artichoke hearts, bell peppers, black olives and Italian dressing and a dessert pizza with cinnamon-spiced pumpkin and cream cheese filling, walnuts and a crumb topping.
Pizza delivery systems are venturing onto the Internet as two new companies offered presentations for the first time this year.
Ford Smith, co-founder and director of Seattle-based Cyberslice, said his company has been in operation for six months, focusing on test markets in Seattle, San Francisco, New York and Boston.
Smith, a venture capitalist who also was a driving force behind the formation of PetsMart, said pizzerias join Cyberslice for a one-time cost of $399. For that, shops get a World Wide Web site linked to Cyberslice (www.cyberslice.com) filled with menus and an order form.
Web surfers are directed to a nearby member via geopositional satellite locators. When a web user makes contact and places an order, the site calculates the cost. When the order is verified by the user, the final mouse click signals a voice-activated unit to call the pizzeria to place the order.
Cyberslice gets a sliding-scale percentage for each order placed through the service.
Pizza on the Web is another ordering system that won't go on line for another month.
J.R. Rogers, president of the Valencia, Calif., company (www.pizzaontheweb.com/), said the system works similarly to the Cyberslice site, but concentrates on pickup orders. Following the final order by a user, Pizza on the Web produces a map generated by the Yahoo search engine directing the buyer to the store site.
Unlike Cyberslice, Pizza on the Web isn't charging pizzerias to be a part of the network. Rogers said he will scan photographs with the menus and place ribbon ads for vendors to generate revenue. Rogers said he expects stores to advertise community events with their menus or call attention to outstanding employees.
Pizza on the Web also will get a percentage of profits on each order generated.
archive
