It’s dark as dusk at midday in the Marina district, with a low, oppressive cloud ceiling and continuous drizzle periodically swelling to a downpour. Dusty Baker breathes deeply, drinking it in.
“I love this,” he says. “But it was time to go.”
At the restaurant he has chosen for lunch, the bartender, a Chicago native, has taped a Cubs poster to the mirror over the back bar. People eye Baker discreetly from their tables, then begin to approach him. An older man in leopard-print suspenders asks him to autograph a menu. A prominent politician pumps his hand. Everyone wishes him luck.
“All right, brother,” he says heartily. “Thank you, man.”
It has been a prolonged farewell these last few weeks, a cross between a graduation party and a wake.
Most professional athletes don’t have the luxury of working near home, but Baker has been based in California since the mid-1970s as a player for the Los Angeles Dodgers, Oakland A’s and San Francisco Giants, the Giants’ hitting coach, and subsequently their manager. His Pacific Bell Park office was within easy driving distance of his family in Sacramento and the hunting and fishing spots he has favored since he was a teenager.
Now Baker is leaving his comfort zone for a job whose recent history is as turbulent as his own has been stable: He has become the Cubs’ 16th manager in 20 years. He is making the rounds this week during the team’s pre-preseason publicity binge and will report to spring training in Arizona in less than a month. In a mildly theatrical twist, the Cubs’ first exhibition game Feb. 27 is away, against the Giants.
Like anyone in transition, Baker, 53, is deciding what to bring, what to leave behind and what to tackle first when he arrives. The motorcycle comes. So do five former Giants coaches. The hunting dog stays, much to his chagrin, because a downtown high-rise is no place for a German shorthaired pointer. The winning habit?
“I expect us to win,” he says. “First we have to get to .500. That’s not going to satisfy me necessarily, but when you won 65 games, you have some work to do. You have 16 games to get to .500. Then you start attacking the rest of it.
“The other thing that intrigued and excited me about this team was the young pitching staff. Just because they’re good, and young, doesn’t mean they know how to win yet.”
Baker is surfacing after a period in which he went underground to recuperate from a stressful autumn. There was the elation of reaching the World Series with the Giants; the twin blows of losing the seventh game and then losing his job after a bruising public feud with Giants owner Peter Magowan; and finally the adrenaline of pulling on a new ballcap for the first time in 14 years.
“I’m not going to say my feelings weren’t hurt some because I put my heart and soul in this town and this area and this team,” Baker says. “But I have nothing bad to say about the Giants. They gave me an opportunity to be in a position to go to the Cubs, to be wanted.
“The final result, the way I look at it, is we were good for and to each other. I have a few bricks in that stadium over there myself.”
Still, the pace of events and the conflicting emotions drained him. He struggled with how to say goodbye to his former players and eventually wrote them Christmas cards. With the exception of Sammy Sosa–who phoned while vacationing in Paris to congratulate him–Baker did not talk to any Cubs players, feeling he should wait until off-season moves shook out.
So unfamiliar is this new terrain that Baker, dressing for his first photo shoot, had to ask longtime Cubs media relations director Sharon Pannozzo whether the team wore blue or black shoes. Even that served its purpose.
“I didn’t know whether to be happy or sad, and I’m rarely like that,” Baker says of the days after the World Series. “You know when I really felt better? It was that day I came to Chicago and put the uniform on and looked at myself in the mirror. It looked pretty cool. The uniform heals.”
A more important sense of closure came last month.
On his way to a family vacation in Hawaii shortly before undergoing surgery for prostate cancer in late 2001, Baker spotted a magazine article about a healing center on the island of Kauai. A century ago, Japanese immigrants cut a trail through the lush vegetation covering the hillsides and built 88 stone Shingon Buddhist shrines. People have been praying there since. Many observe the ritual of taking home a small pouch of dirt and returning to replace it after weathering whatever crisis brought them there.
Baker was drawn to the site. He was raised Baptist, but his spiritual side is fed by many springs.
“Dusty will stop and pray in any open church, no matter the denomination,” says Melissa Baker, his wife of eight years.
He walked among the shrines. He brought back his own pouch and tucked it into a desk drawer. When he thought about it nestled there, he could summon up the serenity of the place.
In December, Baker returned to Hawaii and sprinkled the loamy soil back at its source, considering himself blessed. His cancer is in remission and has not required follow-up treatment, although Baker still has checkups every three months.
Baker has altered his diet, making fruit smoothies and soy milkshakes, snacking on edamame beans. He still loves a Scotch but sips black or green tea daily, believing it helps cleanse the toxins from his body. His mind, he says, is at ease. He is convinced he will be around to help his 3 1/2-year-old son Darren grow into a man, to watch his 23-year-old daughter Natosha make her way in the world.
His wife now says Baker insists she and their son not spend more than a week at a time away from him.
“I’ve been called a free spirit or this or that or whatever all my life, but sometimes you don’t really start living until you see death in the face,” Baker says. “Rain doesn’t bother me. Sunsets you notice more. You might pick a flower now that you wouldn’t have picked before.”
There are limits, however, to what a bouquet can do. Sitting out a year to contemplate nature and baseball job options would have been Baker’s last resort.
“I don’t want to smell any roses,” he growls. “Plus, after talking to [former Blue Jays manager] Cito Gaston, Cito won two World Series and all of a sudden Cito hasn’t had a job since. Maybe it’s not in our best interests as minorities to go home.
“I really feel the best times of my life are ahead of me. I’ve only been managing for 10 years, and I’m going to get better at it.”
Managing with humor
Melissa Baker smiles when she describes her husband’s informal dress code. “He always looks as if he’s ready to climb a mountain or drive a tank,” she says.
Dusty Baker strides city sidewalks in jeans or hunting pants, broad-brimmed hats and big, rugged boots that can handle rocks, roots, silt and deep water.
He favors a Swiss Army watch with a compass, but he does own a Rolex. Giants players presented it to him on his 50th birthday in 1999, the same summer he passed a managerial milestone: 500 victories. The back is inscribed “To Dusty Baker, a great leader.”
“They respect him because he respects them,” says former Giants general manager Al Rosen, who hired Baker to coach in 1988. “He doesn’t try to overwhelm people with his knowledge. He has a way of getting his point of view into the player’s mind.
“A lot of people can write out a lineup card, but not every manager can relate to individuals and knit them together. Not everyone gets to play every day, and players like to know they’re needed and wanted. Dusty views the 25-man roster as just that.”
Baker manages with humor and a minimum of psychological distance. Jumping the hopscotch squares of his life prepared him to move fluidly between cliques. He grew up in a mixed black-Mexican community and speaks fluent Spanish. He confronted racial issues as one of only two blacks in a white high school and as a minor-league player in the South. He served in the Marine reserves, yet addresses people in the beach lingo of dudes and girls and reveres the music and message of reggae legend Bob Marley.
He absorbed the views of ’60s radical black authors, courtesy of his mother, a college history and sociology professor. Yet Baker has embraced older white men as mentors, including Rosen and former 49ers coach Bill Walsh. Books by Phil Jackson and Vince Lombardi share shelf space in Baker’s head alongside the writings of Nelson Mandela, Dr. Martin Luther King and Mohandas Gandhi.
“I might be a little too warlike for Gandhi, though,” Baker says.
`This game is difficult’
His chief credo is that fun in the workplace leads to unity toward a common goal. It is the most cliched and yet most complex thing to pull off in his milieu, but Baker says his feel for using players on the field stems from his off-field understanding of them.
“I try not to forget how hard this game is to play,” Baker says. “This game is very difficult. They just make it look easy.
“You have to find out who’s who, who acts strong and who acts tough and who’s not, who acts meek and is really tough. Who you can joke with, who you can’t, who’s serious all the time, who’s grumpy in the morning, who stays up too late, who needs to stay out later sometimes.”
So he gets close. Baker is not averse to having a drink with a player. He takes them fishing, he knows what they like to eat, he knows their wives and kids. Sometimes it costs him.
“It gets tough sometimes to say hello and goodbye to them and their families sometimes and to be straight-up cold,” he says.
A few years ago he began to doubt his approach. He confided in pitchers Mark Gardner and Felix Rodriguez, saying he was contemplating a retreat into a tougher alter ego, the Hard Bake. They talked him out of it.
“Dusty said he had to change,” Gardner told the San Diego Union-Tribune. “I said, `Don’t do it, because the reason guys play for you is the way you are. They play for you because you get so attached to them.'”
Baker, who famously kept the Giants’ clubhouse motor running despite tension between moody stars Barry Bonds and Jeff Kent, is confident he can make things work with Sosa. He is untroubled by Sosa’s announcement that he will arrive late to spring training again this year.
“Your stars always get treated differently,” Baker says. “I wasn’t as big a star as Sammy, but I got treated differently. It’s just a matter of, do you abuse that privilege or not? It’s OK to bend the rules. Just don’t break them.
“It’s Sammy’s team, and hopefully he can keep doing what he’s doing and lead us to the pennant. You hope that the star of your team is the most maintenance-free guy that you have.”
As far as Baker’s own maintenance goes, leaving home poses some challenges. He plans to send for his parents, who are divorced, as often as they want to come from California.
“Things were at the point where he had to make a move,” says his father and most frequent adviser, Johnnie B. Baker Sr. The two clashed during Dusty’s Little League days and adolescence, but they talk two or three times a week now.
His mother wistfully speaks of visits over coffee and a wedge of sweet potato pie, but she also supports the change.
“I taught my children that if there’s an opportunity, it may be on the other side of the country or the ocean,” says Christine Baker, who saw one of her daughters travel to Colombia to be a missionary. “He’s a person who can adjust very rapidly.”
Network of friends
Chronically gregarious, Baker has an enormous network of friends and seems to have consulted them all before and just after taking the Cubs job. In a chance alignment of sporting planets, White Sox manager Jerry Manuel and Bulls coach Bill Cartwright also grew up near Sacramento and played sports with Baker’s younger brothers. Baker also is close to Notre Dame football coach Tyrone Willingham, whom he got to know during Willingham’s coaching days at Stanford University.
“I know I’m supposed to be in Chicago,” Baker says, steering his truck through the clogged, rainy streets of downtown San Francisco. “I know I’m the one who somehow, some way . . . “
His voice trails off. The windshield wipers beat like dual metronomes in the dimness. It’s just 4 o’clock, but the only light illuminating his face is from within.
“I can’t tell you everything,” he says.
