The Houston Astros’ redemption tour continues on.
Yet a much better redemption tour is coinciding with it, one involving Dusty Baker, a man who was never really in need of redemption anyway.
At age 72, in his 24th season of managing and after more than 50 years in baseball, Baker is getting the love and appreciation his accomplishments have long deserved but were constantly denied. So deserved and so denied that Baker, never one to mince words if clarity served him better, made sure to point it out when his Astros team clinched the American League West championship last month.
Having managed a fifth different team to the playoffs last season in his first year in Houston, now he had won a division title with a fifth different team. Five franchises – the Giants, Cubs, Reds, Nationals, and now Astros – spanning three decades.
Dusty Baker is the first manager in baseball history to accomplish this, yet he wondered whether this distinction was actually worth celebrating.
“I don’t really think nothing, other than why was I on so many different teams,” Baker said, according to Hall of Fame writer Claire Smith in The Athletic. “I’m serious. I feel fortunate to have gotten that many jobs, but I feel unfortunate that I shouldn’t have lost jobs when I was winning.”
Fellow managers, former players and commentators have Baker’s name in constant conversation regarding the Hall of Fame. To get that conversation ignited though, it took getting hired by the Astros two years ago.
Houston had a Problem
Houston was the most toxic organization in pro sports thanks to their cheating scandal uncovered in the 2019-20 offseason.
They fired manager A.J. Hinch and others, like Carlos Beltran, felt the pain in the aftermath. Somehow, they had to save face, power-wash their reputation and drape themselves in at least the façade of credibility.
Dusty Baker was their best bet to do it, in large part because he was available. No team had thought to hire him after the Nationals fired him two years ago, sending him into semi-forced retirement after losing a fourth job when he was winning.
He won two division titles in his only two seasons with Washington (2016 and 2017) but was eliminated in the first round each time. That followed the Reds dumping him in 2013 after two division titles and three playoff trips in six years. This came after the Cubs shoved him overboard in 2006, three years after the 2003 NL championship series collapse, which followed the Giants deciding to change course in 2002 after a seven-game loss in the World Series and 10 years of seven winning seasons and three postseason visits.
The Astros, and baseball, saw Dusty as the franchise savior, and as its cleanser.
Give them credit for staring into their self-created abyss and suddenly seeing a much-maligned, perpetually scapegoated, chronically criticized, casually dismissed lightning rod of a veteran manager as their lifeline to respectability. The sport he had devoted his life to had spent two decades treating him like he was disposable, and this last time didn’t even believe he was recyclable.
The double standard applied to his managing career was unlike few others in the history of the sport.
No wonder it was hard for Baker to ponder celebrating an all-time record that reflected less on his skills and successes as a manager than about what the sport really thought of him.
Managing five teams to division crowns makes him look big and makes baseball look small.
Was this victory – the one achieved and the one still in progress in the AL Championship Series – grander and more improbable than the others? There’s a lot of competition for that.
When the Giants hired him in 1993, they had just come off of nearly being sold to a group that would have moved them out of San Francisco. The Cubs’ World Series drought was well-known when they hired him (it didn’t end until 10 years and five managers later). The Reds were nondescript and irrelevant when he arrived and have returned there since giving him the boot. Only the Nationals, two years after kicking Baker to the curb for no conceivable reason except for not wanting to pay him fairly, reached the pinnacle of the sport soon after his departure with a 2019 Series win.
They’ve since sunk to the bottom of the league.
At the time, nobody believed that Dusty Baker could put the cap on a Hall of Fame career if he could keep the Astros from imploding under the weight of their scandal and shame.
Now, though, he has more than kept them afloat and served as their human shield. With the architects of the cheating scheme all gone, the Astros kept winning anyway. As infuriating as it is to recognize that the Astros could have and should have won without the trash cans and video cameras, it’s illuminating to see that as they do so now, it’s with Baker at the helm fighting with them and for them.
Win or lose, it might be the crown jewel of his managerial career. Considering his story, it’s his most unique.
Hall of Fame Talk, Finally!
Maybe that’s why the Cooperstown talk has (finally) spread so much in the last few weeks.
Even before the Astros called, Dusty’s credentials spoke highly of his candidacy. He is currently 12th in all-time in victories and of the 11 managers ahead of him, 10 are in the Hall and the other is Bruce Bochy.
The comical irony of this push is that it’s happening despite Baker not having won a World Series, the distinction held against him at every stop along the way. Here’s more irony (and comedy)- no Black manager has been enshrined so far.
Cito Gaston has not, and he has two Series wins (Toronto in 1992 and ’93).
Ron Washington made it to the World Series twice (2010, ’11) but his Rangers’ teams failed to win it all both times.
As of today, Gaston and the Dodgers’ Dave Roberts are still the only Black managers to win it all, and those three and Baker are the only ones to get to the Series.
It’s not unprecedented for a two-time Series-winning manager to not get to Cooperstown, but it’s rare.
Just as rare? Going 10 years without another managing job after the team you won those Series with lets you go (when Gaston’s next chance arrived, it was from the Blue Jays again).
Actually, it looks less funny when laid out that way.
The scars and blemishes everybody saw when Baker couldn’t win “the big one” in years past have disappeared. Now, instead of the manager everyone always found reason to get rid of, people see the manager everyone constantly wanted to hire.
If life were even a fraction closer to fairness, Baker wouldn’t have had five teams to get to the playoffs. Maybe just three. Or two. He wouldn’t have had to be a human disinfectant at this stage of his baseball life. He would be getting the rocking chair on the mound, the retired jersey ceremony … the retirement tour.
Dusty Baker should never have been part of a redemption tour. His life, his record and his reputation were not, and are not, in need of redemption.
But the sport that told him four times before that they didn’t need him anymore does.
