Among the items stacked in boxes in Dusty Baker’s office Monday was a framed photograph of a water-stained “apparition” of the Virgin Mary that appeared on the wall of a Fullerton Avenue viaduct a few years back.
Scrawled on the wall, next to the apparition, were two words: “Go Cubs.”
That small taste of Chicago was but one memory Baker will take home to San Francisco with him as he crawls from the wreckage of a lost season. Four years after coming to Chicago as a Cubs savior, as the team’s most high-profile manager since Leo Durocher, Baker is out of a job. General manager Jim Hendry told a packed but not surprised press gathering Monday that Baker’s contract will not be renewed, confirming speculation that had been rampant since July.
“All things must come to an end,” Baker said, gracious and composed at Monday’s news conference. “I wish we could have got it done, but we didn’t.”
Baker leaves with a 322-326 record and the small consolation that he came closer to doing something no Cubs manager has done since Charlie Grimm in 1945: take the team to the World Series. The Cubs were five outs away in 2003, Baker’s first season, but a surreal turn of events found them losing to the Florida Marlins in a seven-game National League Championship Series.
The Marlins went on to win the World Series, the second in six years for the 14-year-old expansion franchise. The 130-year-old Cubs haven’t won a World Series since 1908 (the date as published has been corrected in this text), when Frank “Peerless Leader” Chance was their field boss.
More than 40 managers and five members of a bizarre “college of coaches” have subsequently tried to duplicate Chance, but their efforts have been unavailing as the Cubs close in on a century of futility.
Baker, a “players’ manager” known for being relentlessly positive and upbeat, was supposed to be the guy. A three-time Manager of the Year in San Francisco, he had taken the Giants to three playoff berths and the 2002 World Series a month before the Cubs hired him. Amid heightened expectations brought on by 2003’s close call, they failed to reach the playoffs in Baker’s last three seasons, finishing this season in last place with the National League’s worst record, 66-96.
He left with no regrets, no tears and no apologies. Critics and admirers alike can agree that his four-year run was one of the wildest rides in Cubs history. And as bad as it got in the end, the magic and madness of the summer of ’03 was about as good as it has ever been for a generation of Cubs fans.
“My time here in Chicago was a very good time,” Baker said.
For now, he takes his place alongside lesser-known skippers such as Jim Riggleman, Don Zimmer and Jim Frey in interrupting a near century of mediocrity or worse with one playoff season. That’s not to mention the Don Baylors, Jim Lefebvres, Tom Trebelhorns and others in a longer line of Cubs managers who didn’t get that much done.
“Managing the Cubs used to be the La Brea tar pits of baseball–guys who went in there, disappeared and were never heard from again,” said Steve Stone, who watched more than a dozen managers try and fail over 20-plus years as a Cubs broadcaster. “Dusty will manage again in the big leagues, and he’ll be successful.”
As he was in San Francisco. So what is it about Chicago, and specifically the Cubs, that’s too much of a challenge for some of baseball’s best and brightest?
“I don’t think you can look at one thing and say, `It happened because of this,'” Stone said. “They’ve had old managers, young managers, managers who’d been successful elsewhere, managers who had a modicum of success here. But nobody has sustained it.”
Stone’s advice to the next candidate? “Adopt a different organizational pitching philosophy because of the phenomenal number of injuries to Cub pitchers,” he said. “Everybody knows about Mark Prior and Kerry Wood being hurt all the time, but the next generation has been affected as well. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better-looking young pitcher than Angel Guzman (the name as published has been corrected in this text) in 2003, but I don’t know that he’ll ever get big-league hitters out after all the arm problems he’s had.”
Stone also believes Wrigley Field, the baseball shrine to which the Cubs ascribe much of their enduring popularity, can be a two-faced tease.
“It’s like two different ballparks, and a manager has to be adaptable,” Stone said, “In the spring, when the wind is blowing in, you’ve got to play tightly pitched, close-to-the-vest games and win with small ball. In the summer, when it’s warmer and the wind is blowing out, you’ve got to have bangers who can take advantage.
“A manager likes to tailor his team to his ballpark, but that’s really hard to do with the Cubs. Wrigley Field is a tough place to manage, no question.”
But there won’t be any shortage of candidates lining up for a chance to replace Baker.
Hendry views Wrigley Field as an asset and not a liability.
“I’ve never felt we were going to be out of the mix with anyone who’d be available,” he said.
Baker, when hired, spoke dreamily of the parade he would lead after bringing a World Series title to the North Side.
Cubs broadcaster Bob Brenly, who delivered the 2001 Series title to the Arizona desert and who has hopes of being considered for the job, has higher aspirations.
“If you win it all with the Cubs,” Brenly said, “they’ll rename the lake for you.”
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psullivan@tribune.com
