Friday is Tax Day. And you get the feeling that if Joe Q. Citizen fails to file on time, he probably will blame the media. That’s the culture in which we live.
When his alleged mistress sues Barry Bonds, it’s the media’s fault for reporting it. That said, it was still a surprise Tuesday when Cubs manager Dusty Baker pointed an accusatory finger at the people who cover his team.
Baker was miffed that reporters had approached second baseman Jerry Hairston Jr. to get his reaction to Monday’s lineup. Hairston wasn’t in it, though he had expected to replace the injured Todd Walker.
“What I don’t understand is, he didn’t just come out and call you guys over to talk about it,” Baker said. “Somebody had to ask him.”
Yeah, somebody who was doing his or her job. Most beat reporters have to file two or three stories a day, so of course they were going to see if Hairston was ticked about not playing. It seemed elementary. It was baseball beat reporting 101.
Baker has been in the game for nearly 40 years. Doesn’t he know how reporters operate?
“Dusty doesn’t have a savvy understanding of what we’re supposed to be doing,” said Nick Peters of the Sacramento Bee, who has covered the Giants since 1961. “He thinks it’s still like 20 or 30 years ago, when the writers rode the charters and were part of the team.
“I like him on a personal level, but I didn’t think he was great to work with. If you challenged him, he got very defensive about it. It was his way or the highway.”
Henry Schulman of the San Francisco Chronicle, who covered Baker’s Giants for seven years, also said Baker’s reaction didn’t surprise him.
“I think Dusty, like a lot of former players, maybe hasn’t understood the parameters of our job,” Schulman said. “There were times he’d give you information on a player, and when you went to that player to talk about it, Dusty almost felt like you were going behind his back.
“He was almost saying: `I’ve given you the information. Why do you feel the need to verify it?’ Because that’s what sportswriters do.”
Added Peters: “You have to remember, Dusty still thinks he’s a jock. He has that mentality of `what happens here, stays here.'”
So Baker hasn’t changed. Then why does he so frequently butt heads with the Chicago media after getting such favorable coverage in the Bay Area?
It didn’t hurt that Baker was named National League Manager of the Year in 1993, ’97 and 2000, and that eight of his 10 teams finished in first or second place in the National League West.
Still, isn’t there something else?
“The media in San Francisco was a lot tamer,” Schulman said. “Dusty was a very good manager here, and especially good at getting the most out of the least. The feeling here was that it was stupid to criticize him for two managerial moves that didn’t work when, over the course of 162 games, he was right 95 percent of the time.
“Now he goes to Chicago, where the scrutiny is much more intense. Even if he’s right 95 percent of the time, he’s still going to get hammered on the other 5 percent.”
Baker tried to do the hammering Tuesday. After gathering about 10 reporters in his office, he asked which one had queried Hairston about not being in the lineup. Baker also was upset that reporters had asked Walker about not starting the home opener.
“To me, it looks like somebody is just trying to go to whoever is not playing and start some stuff,” Baker said. “It’s not right because every day you can find somebody who’s not happy about [not] playing. You can’t play everybody at the same time.”
Said Peters: “We always said he could never go to New York because they’d roast him there. We thought he’d get an easier ride in Chicago because he was brought in as a savior. But he set such a high standard that first year (2003), and now he can’t handle it. It’s not going to be a good finish for him there.”
If that’s the case, at least one former Giants beat writer believes it would be Chicago’s loss.
“He was the first manager I covered, and I couldn’t think of a better guy to break in with,” said Joe Roderick, who was on the Giants’ beat from 1993-02 for the Contra Costa Times. “If Dusty has become overly sensitive, perhaps that’s a byproduct of that city’s media coverage. When I talk to him, he’s the same guy who was here.”
Officially official
Marc Silverman and Carmen DeFalco won the bakeoff. They officially have been awarded WMVP-AM 1000’s midday slot, which Jay Mariotti had occupied.
Silverman and DeFalco make a good match because their temperaments are dissimilar. Silverman is the spice that makes Indian food burn your tongue. DeFalco is the yogurt that makes it go down easy.
“He is the exact opposite of me, so we don’t have to play any roles,” Silverman said. “We’re just two guys who love sports and want to talk about it.”
The duo got plenty of attention earlier this month for their probing–but fair–interview with White Sox and Bulls Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf, who ended the session by proclaiming, “I hope you enjoyed it because I won’t be on with you guys again. You conducted this interview under false pretenses, and you won’t get another bite at the apple.”
Silverman said he might try to call Reinsdorf to patch things up.
“I’d love to talk to him in person, on the phone, on air, off air,” he said. “Not [to offer] an apology, but I’d like to have a professional working relationship with everyone in this market.”
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tgreenstein@tribune.com
