Return has Baker filled with glee
After two years away, manager dives right in with Nationals
Washington Nationals manager Dusty Baker, with a $119 gray comforter under his left arm, stares at the clerk behind the counter, reaches into his pocket and slow- ly pulls out a knife. “Is this OK?” he asks. “I need it.” The clerk nods. It’s just a pocket knife. Baker, who just added Adele’s latest CD to his bill, cuts away the cellophane. Moments later, he slips the disc into the stereo of his F-150 truck and hits the highway for a 35-minute drive to his Cocoa Beach condo.
“I wanted a truck out here,” Baker say. “I’ve got a Subaru back home. I’ve got friends who tell me I’m the only brother they know who drives one.”
Baker laughs, climbs into his truck and stops on the way home at an outdoor Tiki bar, the Island Waterfront Bar and Grill on Merritt Island. It’s filled with locals. They stare as he walks in. They don’t know him. He doesn’t know them. It’s perfect.
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Baker, 66, finding a table near the back, orders an IPA and gradually reflects on his five decades in the game and this new, surprise opportunity. He has been in professional baseball since he was 17, played in the big leagues for 18 years, managed another 20 years, but this likely is where it ends.
He signed a two-year, $4 million contract with the Nationals and doesn’t know if he’ll want another. It doesn’t faze him that he’ll be making half the salary he earned in his final season with the Cincinnati Reds. It doesn’t bother him that the Nationals turned to him only after negotiations with Bud Black broke down.
All he knows is that after being out of baseball for the last two years, this is perfect, the opportunity of a lifetime.
He knows he can win big in Washington. He can become the first manager to win a World Series in Washington, D.C., since 1924. He can become Major League Baseball’s first African-American manager inducted into the Hall of Fame.
In that scenario, it’d be much easier to never look back.
“I don’t know how I would have felt if I had never gotten this chance,” Baker tells USA TODAY Sports. “It wasn’t like it was an empty feeling. I have a wonderful life and beautiful family. This game doesn’t run my life.
“But my family knew something was missing. It wasn’t empty, but there was definitely something missing. It was like this blues dude I hung out with during my time off, Lazy Lester. Lazy Lester gave me this CD this winter, and it goes, ‘Aww, I’m itchy, and I don’t know where to scratch.’
“That’s what it felt like. I had an itch, and I didn’t know where to scratch.”
Baker finishes his beer and hits the road again, this time to a $2 million beach condo that he’s renting for the spring. It has panoramic views of the Space Coast. He sits back in his deck chair, watches the pelicans flying overhead, the moon slowly rising out of the ocean, but suddenly he is startled, seeing a submarine emerging from the ocean.
“Look at that, the Russians are coming, the Russians are coming,” he laughs. “Man, you see everything out here. It’s so beautiful. Things have changed so much since the last time I was here.
“I used to hate coming to Florida.”
No one bothered to camouflage bigotry when Baker trained in nearby Vero Beach, Fla., playing for the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 1970s. He heard racist slurs just walking along the beach. His wife at the time was asked whether she was a housekeeper.
“People wouldn’t rent to me in Vero when I got there,” Baker said. “I would walk around, and I’d hear more people calling me (a racial slur) more than in Mississippi, Alabama, everywhere. I finally become the first brother to stay on the beach in Vero.
“Now, I come back here after all of those years, and, man, things have changed. It’s so nice. People are friendly. Nothing like it used to be.”
‘THE GAME LEFT ME’ Baker was out of the game for only two years, but times have changed in baseball, too. Instant replay has arrived. Modern forces that affect the game on and off the field — be it sabermetrics, social media or shifting societal winds — are more prevalent and move even faster than when Baker lost his job with the Reds.
Baker discovered the difference almost immediately at the winter meetings in December when he praised his former closer, Aroldis Chapman, in a question-and-answer period, creating a firestorm because Chapman’s domestic violence incident with his girlfriend — he was suspended for 30 games Tuesday — had just been revealed.
“All I’ve gotten was criticism since I’ve been managing,” Baker said, “and all I’ve ever done was won. All you hear is what Dusty can’t do. He can’t do this. He can’t do that.
“Then how come I keep kicking your ass? There are a lot of haters out there.”
Baker has won more ballgames, 1,671, than all but 16 major league managers. He has the same winning percentage (.526) as Hall of Fame manager Tommy Lasorda. He is a three-time manager of the year and three-time runner-up. His teams have been to the postseason seven times, including in three of the last four years he was in Cincinnati, with eight seasons of at least 90 victories. The San Francisco Giants improved by 31 games in his first season on the job. The Chicago Cubs made an immediate 21game improvement.
Yet after he was fired by the Reds after losing the wild-card game in 2013 to the Pittsburgh Pirates, Baker couldn’t get back in the game. He called clubs — the Dodgers, Seattle Mariners, Detroit Tigers, Arizona Diamondbacks, Nationals — but no one would call back. Nothing.
There have been 19 managerial changes since 2014, but if not for the Nationals, Baker would be at home, working on his vineyard and managing his solar energy business.
“I called teams to just show people that I wasn’t retired,” Baker said. “When I got fired by Cincinnati, they wanted me to tell the world I was retiring. They told me it sounded too harsh. I said, ‘Call it like it is.’ They said, ‘Let’s just tell the world there’s a mutual understanding.’
“I said, ‘There’s nothing mutual about this.’ You’re the ones who fired me.’ ”
Baker, takes a deep breath, slowly exhales, and says, “People ask me now, ‘ Why did you come back to the game?’ I tell them, ‘I never left. The game left me.’ ”
CHEMISTRY MAJOR Baker takes the elevator down to the lobby, walks out the glass door and gets back into his truck, this time listening to a collection of R&B songs compiled by his 17year-old son, Darren.
It’s a short drive to the Dockside Bar and Grill in Melbourne. Baker orders a cup of soup and an old-fashioned chili dog.
He talks about the challenge of taking over the Nationals. This is a star-studded team, with reigning National League MVP Bryce Harper roaming the outfield and 2013 American League Cy Young Award winner Max Scherzer helming a decent rotation. Talent has never been an issue in Washington, but there hasn’t been a bigger underachieving team in baseball over the last three years, and Baker will be its third manager in four seasons.
The Nationals’ chemistry has been widely viewed as the biggest problem by outsiders; one former player, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the topic’s sensitive nature, told USA TODAY Sports the club seemed uptight, daunted by outsized expectations and took losses far too hard.
The players that remain insist they get along and have leadership. For whatever reason, free agents Jason Heyward, Yoenis Cespedes, Ben Zobrist and Darren O’Day opted to play elsewhere, leaving second baseman Daniel Murphy as the club’s biggest upgrade.
“I keep hearing people talk about their chemistry, but why?” Baker said. “Is it because they had that fight? I’ve never been on no team that didn’t have a fight. It just wasn’t public.”
The Nationals shared their quarrels with the world in September when closer Jonathan Papelbon choked Harper on the bench after he didn’t run out an infield pop-up.
“Everybody wants to complain about it,” Baker said, “and nobody wants to change it. The only reason David was the leader against Goliath was because nobody else had the (guts) enough to fight him. You’ve got to change the mind-set and try to change the losing mentality and culture.”
Anyone who knows Baker — whether it’s a former player, a coach or one of his fishing buddies — believes that if anyone can make a difference, it’s him.
“To me, Dusty is the perfect guy there,” said Reds outfielder Jay Bruce, who spent the first six seasons of his major league career with Baker. “Dusty is a master ego manager. He’s just really, really good at understanding how everyone kind of ticks.
“This game has gotten younger, more analytical and a bit away from the baseball people. But people forget there’s a human element to the game. Dusty brings that. I don’t know anyone else in baseball who has 15 friends waiting on him after every game.”
No one in baseball has more of an eclectic group of friends than Baker, who has done everything from smoking a joint with Jimi Hendrix in San Francisco to kneeling on-deck when Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s career home run record to hanging out with President Obama.
“I remember one day we were talking,” Bruce said, “and Dusty says, ‘Hey man, you know the Dos Equis man, the most interesting man in the world?’
“‘Well, if he’s the most interesting man in the world, I’ve got to be the second most.’ ”
FLEA BATHS Baker had prostate cancer 15 years ago, an irregular heartbeat in 2012, followed by a stroke and cataract surgery this winter, but he says he’s rejuvenated. He telephoned former Washington Redskins coach Joe Gibbs two weeks ago, asking how he balanced his life going from private business to a return to coaching.
“We talked for a while,” Baker said, “and then he caught me off guard. He says, ‘ Let me pray for you.’ I never even met this man, and we prayed on the phone.
“Man, I found that to be pretty heavy.”
Baker’s layoff allowed him the chance to walk his daughter down the aisle and take what late blues singer John Lee Hooker told him was a flea bath. A flea bath? “That’s when things go bad and a lot of people don’t call or come around no more. So once you get back to going good, at least you know who the fleas are. “I got my flea bath.” Baker, back on his wraparound deck, stares at the beautiful sky and moon and wonders if the stars are aligned for him. He recalls a vivid dream he had years ago.
In this dream, he’s celebrating a World Series championship. And wearing a red uniform.
“Hey man, I believe in my dreams,” Baker said. “I believe this is supposed to happen. There’s a reason for all of this.
“There’s not a doubt in my mind.”