‘100%, we want to win for him’
HOUSTON — When the Yankees made a critical defensive error while clinging to a onerun lead Sunday in the final game of the American League Championship Series, the entire Astros dugout perked up, with several players joining their teammates on the top step.
It all goes back to one of Dusty Baker’s favorite sayings: “Even if it’s not a big break, you’ve got to pretend it’s a big break.”
That nugget — one of Baker’s many Dusty-isms — turned out to be right on the money as the Astros turned that break into the play that eventually ended the Yankees season and earned the Astros another trip to the World Series, which begins Friday night against the Phillies.
Listen to the Astros’ 73-yearold manager speak too often, and you’ll hear a lot of the same stories. They’re pretty incredible tales, from sharing a joint with Jimi Hendrix to helping invent the high five. As the stories start flowing, so do some of the baseball lifer’s mantras.
One of those Dusty-isms sounds like it was uttered an ancient philosopher: “He who relaxes the most, concentrates the most and is the most determined is the one who usually wins.”
Astros rookie Jeremy Peña has lived that out this month, proving to be unflappable while delivering some of his team’s biggest hits through seven playoff games.
“Dusty’s a cool dude. He’s always cool under any scenario, and it kind of rubs off on you,” Peña said. “He tells you to just go out there, play hard for me and let everything take care of itself.”
So far, everything has done just that as Baker led a 106-win team on his way to joining the 2,000-win club, making him just the 12th manager to reach that mark. But he’s the only man on that list without a World Series championship.
In his 12th postseason, Baker is trying to snap that dry spell.
“Twelve’s been my lucky number since I was a little kid,”
said Baker, who wears No. 12 on the back of his Astros jersey and had that number in all four of his stops as a player.
For a man who’s been in professional baseball for 55 years, Baker is beloved in his own clubhouse for not living up to the stereotype of the grizzled veteran. He’s not above getting caught doing a little dance behind the batting cage during pregame when Minute Maid Park plays fellow California native Too Short’s 2006 hit “Blow the Whistle.”
He creates bonds with his players through meals, often bringing personalized food orders to the clubhouse for his players. He went to Kenny & Ziggy’s New York Delicatessen during Yom Kippur so third baseman Alex Bregman could break his fast in style.
Last year, Baker stopped at his favorite Mexican food spot in Oakland to bring José Urquidy, who’s from Mazatlán, Mexico, a bowl of pozole “so he’ll be strong.”
That kind of attention to detail leads to what everyone saw
as team owner Jim Crane raised the American League Championship trophy at Yankee Stadium and the unmistakable bellowing voice of Héctor Neris rose above the applause and shouts.
Dusty! Dusty! Dusty! Soon, the rest of his teammates joined in the chant as Baker cracked a wide smile and playfully tried to wave them off.
“We love going out there every single day and competing for him,” Bregman said. “He loves this team. He loves winning. He loves the game of baseball, and 100 percent, we want to win for him.”
Getting that kind of buy-in from all corners of the clubhouse means Bakers must flex the bilingual skills he picked up playing winter ball in Latin America. That ability causes him some headaches in news conferences when the media occasionally asks him to answer questions in both English and Spanish.
“I should have never let you know I speak Spanish,” he said with a chuckle during a postgame
news conference in the Yankees series.
He’s much more at ease switching languages when he’s with his players and away from cameras.
“I think managing different cultures is probably one of the easier things for me to do because I’ve lived in various cultures throughout my life,” said Baker, who grew up in Southern California and played winter ball in Venezuela, Puerto Rico and Mexico. “I’ve been in almost every culture that you can be in, and I think ... what makes the world go round is taking people for their face value and accepting people how they are without trying to change them. But hopefully you can have some influence to help them be better like people did for me.”
Not all of Baker’s powers come from old stories or mantras. Although he has a common refrain when anyone brings up a batter’s exit velocity — “Everybody talks about exit speed, but I always talk about exit hits” — he isn’t so stuck in his ways that he doesn’t heed the direction of analytics, even if sometimes he just goes with his gut.
“I’ve always used both,” said Baker, going all the way back to his first year as manager with the Giants in 1993. “I used both when it didn’t have a name. Like, back in the day, I used first-batter efficiency, I used runners inherited, I used walks per nine, strikeouts per nine, fly balls versus ground balls. It didn’t have a name, but I used it, or if it wasn’t available, I would ask for it.”
To no one’s surprise, Baker doesn’t see his players as a series of numbers on a data sheet. He tries to make sure they stick together, and he even walks into the clubhouse and asks for the music to be turned up before games if he feels like the energy isn’t right.
“I’ve heard in this modern world that chemistry’s not important, but chemistry is the most important thing that can take you through especially the tough times,” Baker said. “It’s not that important during the good times, but it’s very, very, very important during the tough times, and every team’s going to have some tough times. So yeah, this is a great group of guys. The American guys don’t complain if salsa music is on or merengue music is on, and the Latin guys don’t complain if rap’s on, and the white guys don’t complain if there’s R&B on. I mean, this is a good group of guys.”
His players feel the same about him.
“I would love to just sit around and have a beer with this man,” closer Ryan Pressly said. “He’s got so many cool stories and the guys he’s played with. I think that would be one of the coolest things to sit around and have some beers with him and, ‘Tell me what it was like in the ’60s when you were playing and how intense it was. What was it like standing on-deck when Hank Aaron hit that home run? Hopefully one of these days I can sit down with him and have a beer with him and talk about all this stuff.”