Replacing Baker not as easy as assumed

Whenever I looked up some aspect of Dusty Baker’s overflowing life, his full name often caught my eye: Johnnie B. “Dusty” Baker.

I thought, ‘Can’t we upgrade that “B” to a “B-plus?”’

After letting Baker’s contract expire Friday, the Washington Nationals now have a tough job on their hands. Those B-plus big-league managers are hard to find.

Good luck, Nats. You’ll need it. You don’t miss your sanity until the crazy arrives.

Nats General Manager Mike Rizzo explained Friday, sort of, why Baker won’t be back, even though he described Baker as “a Hall of Fametype manager” and someone who represented the club “with class and dignity at all times.”

“Regular-season wins and division titles,” Rizzo said, “are not enough. With success comes expectations … our goal is a parade down Pennsylvania Avenue.”

I asked Rizzo on his conference call: If any of a dozen plays, or umpires calls, or replay decisions had come out differently last week in Game 5 against the Cubs and the Nats had advanced to the National League Championship Series, would Dusty be back as manager?

“I’m sorry, I didn’t quite hear that question,” Rizzo said.

I don’t doubt him. But it does show how slender the threads on which careers and franchise directions hang.

I have covered quite a few managers whom I considered better than Baker at in-game decisions, lineup construction and deciding when to bench a slumping star in the middle of a playoff series. However, they are all in the Hall of Fame.

Perhaps the Nats will find such a manager for next season, when they will be absolutely stacked with talent, even ¡before they add any off-season pieces through trades, free agent signings or internal promotions. Just getting back Adam Eaton to replace (presumably) departing Jayson Werth (.226) will be a major upgrade.

But I wouldn’t be able to find that hypothetical manager for 2018, even with a blank checkbook. Nats fans often say, “In Rizzo we trust.” How on earth will the GM create a decent bullpen at the trade deadline? Not one pundit, local or national, mentioned Sean Doolittle, Ryan Madson or Brandon Kintzler as possibilities for the Nats. Rizzo got ’em all.

In decision-making, there is only one hole in Rizzo’s socks. He had a chance to hire a manager after 2013 and decided Matt Williams was an excellent choice, saying publicly and privately that Williams was going to be “a great manager.” Williams lacked only one skill: communicating with humans. By his second season, Williams was avoiding his own clubhouse in the afternoons so he could find shoulders on other floors of Nats Park to commiserate on. That was a miss.

Here are Rizzo’s challenges. First, where is the veteran manager with a track record anywhere close to Baker’s who is available or likely to be out of work soon? There is none, except perhaps John Farrell, who inherited a Red Sox team built by Theo Epstein and previously managed by Terry Francona and took it to the 2013 world title in his first year in Boston.

In 2014, Brad Ausmus was hailed as an ultimate managerial candidate, an eloquent but tough Dartmouth grad who was up to speed on the new analytics but played 1,971 games in the majors as a catcher. How could he fail? This year, fired. The X Factor nobody spotted: He lost more than he won. Maybe that was his apprenticeship, like Joe Torre’s miserable early years.

When the Nats look at veteran candidates, they’ll all fall under the long shadow of Baker, who ranks 14th in history in career managerial victories and has a career winning percentage of .532. That is an interesting neighborhood: the .530s. It includes Terry Francona, Joe Maddon, Torre, Tony LaRussa and Whitey Herzog.

Now for Rizzo’s second challenge: Where is the rookie manager who can walk into a clubhouse with personalities and resumes as big as Bryce Harper, Max Scherzer, Stephen Strasburg, Daniel Murphy, Ryan Zimmerman, Anthony Rendon, Gio Gonzalez and Matt Wieters, and immediately command respect, while also maintaining the current upbeat, constructive clubhouse atmosphere.

Where is the rookie manager — and there are only two kinds, vets and rookies — who will have his tough decisions not only obeyed, but swallowed by the entire team without indigestion, including in October.

Maybe Baker, 68, wasn’t quite a Hall of Fame manager. Though he was an A-plus at managing people and clubhouses, perhaps he was just a solid, conventional manager within games who thought showing confidence in his mainstay players was more important than making analytically brilliant or intuitive moves.

Finding a manager better than Johnnie B-plus “Dusty” Baker probably can be done. But good luck trying.