Dusty Baker working for the Cubs? Surely it’s either too good to be true, or too true to be good.
Given the star-crossed history of this team, here’s what will happen. After watching games at Notre Dame and Indianapolis last weekend, Baker will decide he wants to become a football coach.
Then the Cubs can sign Bob Melvin or Bob Probert and it will be business as usual at Wrigley Field. But no, it’s serious now. The franchise trying to scratch a 95-year itch is indeed poised to employ the best manager available.
Why Baker would leave the San Francisco Giants, or why they would leave him after such a successful run, makes no sense, which is why he probably will come to Chicago, where baseball defies the lore of averages.
You’ve heard all the jokes. Why was Darren Baker, Dusty’s 3-year-old son, bawling after Game 7 in Anaheim? Because Daddy told Darren the family is moving to Chicago, so he’d seen his last World Series game. Or Dusty wants the Cubs so Darren never again will be in danger of getting run over at home plate during the World Series. In October at Wrigley Field, Darren will be safe from everything except pigeons.
Most Cubs fans, anxious but wary, think Baker’s arrival would be the biggest thing to hit the North Side since legendary Leo Durocher took over as skipper in 1966. Yes and no.
We shouldn’t forget that Dallas Green, who managed the Philadelphia Phillies to a championship in 1980, was brought in as general manager a year later.
He was not your typical Cubs hire. In fact, one of his first pronouncements was that there was such a losing attitude around Wrigley Field you could even see it in the ushers. The ushers took offense, because they had a better year than the players, but Green shook things up. So did Harry Caray when he jumped from the White Sox for the Cubs, a move the Sox finally avenged Friday by assigning Bruce Kimm to coach third base.
Don Baylor’s appointment as manager in 2000 was undeniably bold, too, and it looked like a nice arrangement until Baylor became lobotomized. There must be something in the ivy. Strong, powerful leaders show up here pledging to change the Cubs, and the Cubs wind up changing them. Baylor had a reputation as a tough guy who would make the Cubs hungry. But after a while, when he was asked why this is such a special place, he said we have nice restaurants.
Let’s hope Dusty Baker won’t come here just to eat, retire or catch the Pirates. After nine decades of extending a welcome mat to the underqualified, it’s time for the Cubs to experiment with someone who might be overqualified.
Baker is adept at getting inside athletes’ heads, a key maneuver according to a group of neuroscientists who recently released a study revealing that baseball is 90 percent mental. Dr. Stephen G. Lisberger told the Wall Street Journal that muscles are nice, but not as important to an athlete as “brain skills.” This is a major breakthrough for the Cubs, who are routinely portrayed as fat or lazy or spastic or just plain bad. Alas, it turns out that since 1908, the Cubs have merely been too dumb.
Dusty Baker could fix that, and by chasing him, Jim Hendry appears to be a man without the usual insecurities of a young general manager. Now if Hendry will acquire a few more players for Baker, a players’ manager, the Cubs might be on to something. Every hundred years or so, they get it right.
Sign Dusty Baker before the snow flies, although it’s not Chicago winters that scare Cub managers. It’s the summers.
