How spirituality is guiding Washington's Dusty Baker on one last run
VIERA, Fla. – Dusty Baker dug into his bag and pulled out a datebook. It overflowed with scraps of paper, phone numbers, reminders, memorable quotes and other lagniappes from a life that had grown too busy for an organizer to contain. Tucked amid the chaos was a photograph. He looked at it longingly.
It’s a piece of land, empty but for a too-perfect rainbow that bathes it. Trees swathe the edges. The ocean smiles from below. Baker owns the place, five acres on the southern coast of Kauai, near the Lawai International Center, where he goes when he needs to think. Japanese immigrants built 88 shrines there a century ago. Today, like so many places on the Hawaiian island, it exists as a spiritual center, a place to lose yourself and get away from a world that long ago lost itself.
Baker will grow old there. “One of my goals in life,” he said, “is to say, ‘I’m tired of sitting on the beach today.’ ” He’ll install solar power into his house, start a garden, live off the grid, just him and this place calling him.
For now, though, he’s refusing to listen. He’s here in Viera, a little town off the Space Coast, 66 years old, his sixth decade in baseball beckoning, another managerial job waiting. This time it’s the Washington Nationals, and after turns with the San Francisco Giants and Chicago Cubs and Cincinnati Reds, it’s almost surely his last. He tried life without baseball. It never took.
“I didn’t want to come back to baseball the first time, and when I was a stockbroker in ’87, baseball called upon me,” Baker said. “My dad told me that whatever I’ve learned, God wouldn’t have put me in a position to be around some of the greats of all time in this game on and off the field to take to the woods and not share with other people.
“It wasn’t mine to possess. It’s mine to share. I asked my dad what his purpose in life was, and he said it was to raise kids. So I asked him, ‘What’s my purpose in life?’ And he said it’s to serve people. That’s not really what I wanted to hear, but that’s what he said.”
None of the books that line the shelf in Johnnie B. Baker Jr.’s spring-training office impart wisdom with as much resonance as Johnnie B. Baker Sr.’s. There’s “Lincoln on Leadership” and “Leadership Secrets of Atilla the Hun” and “Psychology of Champions” and “The Art of War for Managers” and a dozen other tomes Dusty studies and parses and downloads into his brain for that perfect moment. They’re just extensions of what he learned from Johnnie Sr., who died in 2009.
“My sister told me my dad would’ve wanted me to take this job,” Baker said. “If my dad was alive, just me even thinking about not taking it would’ve – he would’ve said, ‘Sometimes, it’s not in your control. It’s not your decision.’ See, we think everything is our decision. It’s not. Know what I mean?”
If free will was somehow subverted, that means Baker believes destiny or some other mystical force brought him here. And that the manager whose career exists because of another belief – that he relates to players better than anyone – happens to be taking over a clubhouse noted for its levels of dysfunction presents him with the sort of challenge that requires a surgeon’s precision and psychologist’s approach.
“You know the commercial with 'The Most Interesting Man in the World' from Dos Equis? Well, Dusty thinks he’s the second-most interesting man, and he’s pretty close,” said Nationals starter Bronson Arroyo, who played for Baker in Cincinnati. “He’s as eclectic a human being as I’ve ever seen. He’s such a mixed bag. He’s into music. He will feel as close to a player as you can possibly get as a manager. He still walks around with swag. He likes to get out at night and have a drink at the jazz club, and then he comes in and takes this game seriously. He likes to play hard and work hard, man, and I respect that, especially for a guy his age.
“He demands respect in a way that there’s no way he can lose the locker room. It’s nice to have someone who’s captain of the ship, who can say, ‘I’m captain of the ship, boys, and if this [expletive] sinks, I’m going down with it.’ ”
Stabilizing a ship on which the just-traded-for closer choked the soon-to-be MVP takes more than a little seafaring. Baker inherits from the fired Matt Williams a team stocked with elite talent, from Bryce Harper to Max Scherzer to Stephen Strasburg to Anthony Rendon, that rivals the best teams in baseball. This is not a job into which one falls backward, and yet that’s almost exactly how Baker landed it. Washington wanted to hire Bud Black. He balked at the Nationals’ insulting contract offer of reportedly $1.6 million for one year. Baker accepted a two-year deal at about half the salary he made in Cincinnati because it was a job, and as hard as it is to find a job as a 60-something black man in a sport whose managerial hiring practices skew young and white, that one came along period renewed his hope.
Now he gets to manage in a city that hasn’t seen a World Series game in more than 80 years and try to win his first championship as a manager on his terms. A career 1,671-1,504 record and the gravitas of a long and successful playing career buy Baker that sort of autonomy, and it’s something for which he’ll never apologize. He starts a sentence: “When I was playing with Hank Aaron … ”; even though he concludes it with a lesson he learned, it could end with: “ … nearly a quarter of major league managers weren’t even born.”
If Baker isn’t a direct rejoinder to the game’s evolution, he is certainly a challenge. “I don’t know if the game has evolved or grown in the right direction,” he said. This is simultaneously reflexive – criticism of Baker, from his handling of young Cubs pitchers to the rigidity with which he manages his bullpen – and reductive. Just because Baker disagrees with the pervasiveness of sabermetrics and analytics doesn’t mean someone who prides himself on being so well-read should dismiss them with the fashion he does.
At the same time, it does hew to an ethos that buttresses Baker: conformity is overrated. “After 14, I quit trying to fit in,” he said. “Why am I going to try to fit in when I might have the lead on it already?” He tells his son, Darren, not to bother with trends. Before his first day with the Nationals, Baker reminded himself.
“Just be yourself,” Baker said. “Be me. Oldest of five. Leader of almost every team I’ve been on since I was a kid. They made me the leader in the Marines. I speak Spanish. I get along with all dudes. I’ve been in all cultures. I was the only black dude in high school. I was in Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Mexico. I feel just as comfortable over here as I do over there. That’s why it bothers me when people think they know me and they really don’t. That’s the reason I want to let people know me this time.”
While Baker wasn’t exactly a shut-in at his past stops, his openness this spring peeled back another layer. He told Washington Post reporter Dave Sheinin that he sat in a room with a gun following a divorce and tax issues only to be interrupted by his daughter. He speaks of people lost – Bill Walsh, who gave Baker his personal notes on how to run an organization, and John Wooden, whose signed pyramid of success adorns his office wall – and wants to be remembered with the same fondness.
“This,” Baker said, “is gonna help me get to Kauai.”
There are books to read, players to motivate, a World Series to win, so much left to do. Much as the soft sand of the island was calling, baseball’s magnetism overwhelmed it. Dusty Baker can get tired of sitting on the beach some other time. Paradise these days is a ballpark.
