What makes him special is his curiosity: At age 72, the Dusty Baker story is still being writt

“Daffy?”

Dusty Baker slips into an almost imperceptible Southern drawl, the sort that comes out when many a friend of Satchel Paige’s lovingly imitate the beloved Negro Leagues legend.

“Daffy!”

“Now you know my name is Dusty!” Baker recalls replying with mock indignation on more than one occasion. “How could a man whose fishing rods I carried around never get my name right? Goodness!”

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“‘I know what your name is … Daffy!’” Baker says, again quoting Paige, the long-ago whimsical retort that to this day still makes the veteran manager laugh.

Baker’s memories of fishing rods, of Paige and, yes, satchels he literally carried for his elderly friend are still as sharp as when they were formed in 1968. He speaks fondly of that time long gone by, when a starstruck 19-year-old September call-up improbably teamed up with a 62-year-old figure of mythic proportions, on the Atlanta Braves.

 Johnnie B. “Dusty” Baker, then an outfield phenom out of Riverside, Calif., knows he was there to listen and learn, to embrace and evolve. His parents taught him as much when raising their son in the multicultural melting pot that was California.

Paige? The part-time pitcher, front-office adviser to then-Braves president Bill Bartholomay and an assistant trainer, was on the roster at his request. Paige, long past his “rookie” season of 1948, needed 158 days of big-league service time to qualify for a player’s pension. The Braves, one of 20 teams Paige approached, accommodated.

Paige’s success at becoming vested in the pension would later be measured in a very precise way: a whole $250 a month payment. Baker? He benefited in so many nuanced yet invaluable ways as he gleaned knowledge from the first of many sage elders he’d come to know, through the years, decades, eras.

Now, 50-plus years after being joshed by Old Satch, 72-year-old Baker finds himself measuring his riches in ways not all that different from Paige.

He is now the invaluable mentor, with a sharp wit and wisdom as widely sought after by players, media, coaches and managers as anyone wearing a major-league uniform.

Baker this week will lead the 2021 AL West champion Houston Astros into a division playoff series against the AL Central-winning Chicago White Sox. The White Sox’s 77-year-old Tony La Russa is the only big-league manager older than Baker, something that will likely be noted early and often in the coming days and weeks.

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As Baker’s continued success suggests, he has earned his place among the game’s most successful skippers. How he remains stubbornly forever young and eternally relevant tells a story most won-lost percentages and pennant wins can’t. (Full disclosure: Baker is on the steering committee for the Claire Smith Center for Sports Media at Temple University.)

If you think not, name a topic on which he can’t speak. Any topic.

You want Satchel stories? Dusty Baker is your man.  Hank Aaron insights? Just ask the fella who was in the on-deck circle when Aaron’s historic home run No. 715 flew off The Hammer’s bat in 1974.

Mays? Clemente, Koufax? Joe Morgan, Al Kaline, Willie Stargell, Don Baylor? Those are and were his peers, brothers. Black, White, Latino, it did not matter. All helped each other come of age as men, teammates, husbands, fathers, friends in the tumult of the 1960s, an era that saw a war in Vietnam divide generations, saw cities burn and a Civil Rights movement shape the fight of their lives.

Baker did not run from the world that roiled about him as a young man. In Atlanta, he sought out the confidants of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, iconic figures like Ralph David Abernathy, Jesse Jackson and Andrew Young among other Civil Rights leaders of the 1960-70s.

By 2007, when Baker could command a stage, he did so as an up-close-and-personal friend of Barack Obama’s during the latter’s historic election as America’s first Black president.

“One of the best things that happened to me in Chicago was that I got to know Barack Obama,” says Baker, the former Cubs manager, who speaks to sharing meals of ham and  collard greens with Michelle Obama and the future commander in chief as they talked about everything from college accessibility to global warming.

To hear of that Dusty Baker surprises few. “He was a heck of a player, but even before, he just sounded like an old soul,” says Al Downing, the one-time pitcher who played in the Texas League against the young phenom in the ’60s, then teamed with Baker on the winning Los Angeles Dodgers teams of the ’70s. “He was always serious, so mature, so studious. But, I mean, he was in the Marine Corps Reserves during Vietnam, when you had to be in uniform for six months a year, and also two weeks during the season. There were reasons for being as serious as a heart attack.”

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Neither the intensity nor the confidence born of his youth have ever ebbed, contends Sam Mondry-Cohen, assistant general manager and director of Research and Development with the Washington Nationals. Mondry-Cohen learned as much when working with Baker during 95- and 97-win seasons from 2016-17.  “He’s just incredibly comfortable in his own skin,” said Mondry-Cohen. “He knows who he is and is very self-confident. Some people find many of the new technologies or strategies or just new things in the field threatening. Dusty’s not going to be threatened by anything. He just knows how to adapt and grow.”

Baker also knows how to look cool.

“He always wanted to have that swag, he always wanted to look good, he wanted his players to look good, too,” says Bryce Harper, smiling broadly as he recalls his coming of age years with Baker’s Nats. “He’s always got the wristbands on, he’s got the bracelets, he’s got the glasses, his lenses change so that they match his suits. I mean, he’s just cool — always eating his fruit during the game, doing what’s good for his body. He’s a good-looking dude and a bad man at the same time. By that I mean he’s somebody that’s always going to fight for his players. He’s going to be on the top step for his players always, and I love that about him. I do, I really do.”

So the ever-present toothpick, the wristbands, the tinted glasses, it can’t be a mistake that those things are as much a part of the Baker signature as his autograph on the sweet spot of a baseball.

 Well …

“People look in the dugout and they see the toothpick and wristbands and think ‘cool,’ but the truth is, I’ve been wearing wristband as long as I’ve played,” said Baker. “Go back and look at all my baseball cards and you will see. I wear them because they hide my incredibly skinny arms.

“My glasses? They are necessary. And the toothpick? Well, my wife hated that I always used Copenhagen. And that stuff is slow death, man. So, I changed it for a toothpick. A bit late in the game, but it gave me something else to chew on.”

To this day, his players and peers dating back to the ’60s will tell you Baker is never one to ignore the finer things in life. He owns a vineyard in Northern California, and bottles and sells is own brand-name line of fine wines. He’s an avid gardener, his roses a perennial salute to his late father.

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Baker paints. And, brother, does he like music. Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, John Lee Hooker. Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Winter. Bonnie Raitt, Snoop Dogg … Most of us only know such artists as names on record labels and CDs. Dusty can speak all day about his friendships or meetings with such legends at concerts, the Monterey Jazz Festival, the hip-hop performances he’d take in with his daughter — those venues are where the soundtrack of his life played out, and he shares generously.

“He loves music,” says Harper. “I love music as well, so, being able to talk about concerts he has been to, the people he’s met. Dusty, he can talk about anything!”

“When you hear them talking to players or media or anyone, he’s not just drawing on baseball,” agreed Mondry-Cohen. “He is drawing them in on, through music, through art, through other sports,” he adds, referencing Baker’s close ties to Bill Walsh, Bill Russell and legends across the sports universe. “You hear a lot about Native American culture from Dusty, about religion. He’s very spiritual. I believe what makes him special is his curiosity. This is his world, and he brings it all into baseball.”

 The upbringing provided him by his mother, Christine, and his namesake, Johnnie B. Sr., assured that. The Bakers made sure that their children both understood and appreciated the melting pot that was the Southern California farming community of Riverside that the family called home during Dusty’s younger years. “Riverside was a town of about 50,000 then, just the perfect size,” he says. “You played with Blacks, Whites, Mexicans, Asians. And our house was the baseball field, because we had a big backyard.”

It was there that Baker met his first sports hero – future major-league All-star Bobby Bonds. Baker did his best to emulate Bonds, three years his senior. And the whole neighborhood benefited after Johnnie Baker Sr. turned the family’s spacious backyard into a baseball field.

After Bobby became a local legend four-sport letterman, Dusty wanted no less. He would eventually finish off the deed in Sacramento after his family moved north. Though that city was far less a melting pot than Riverside, Baker said he never felt uncomfortable. He captained teams and built the skills that led him into professional baseball.

Though he was a California kid, he knew enough of his father’s roots in the South to not want to go there. “But I went directly South where it was totally segregated. I’d prayed that I would not be drafted by Braves, but that’s the team that drafted me,” he says.  “And it was the best thing that happened to me.”

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There he met Aaron, who’d promised Christine Baker that Dusty would be under his wing, go to church, not get in trouble. And though he was initially intimidated by Jim Crow – “I didn’t know what kind of schooling I was going to get” — lessons and coping skills came quickly: in the daunting Texas League, in winter-ball stops in Puerto Rico, Mexico and Venezuela, in Atlanta, in the Marine Corps.

“We got a different understanding on and off the field,” Baker says. “It was a totally different understanding. The Marines really, really, really helped as much with learning teamwork as anything else I’d ever known. When you’ve got a month together and you’ve got to be prepared to guard a guy’s life, that’s about as good a teamwork as you can get.”

It was profound, and unforgettable, that collage of colliding cultures and critical crossroads, Baker realizes now. Like so many stops before and after, Baker came to accept something that would serve him well throughout life: He was where he was meant to be.

Like Paige, Baker found that life was never as easy as it could have been, but for the color of his skin. The South may have prepared him for life, but it also made him grow up fast.

He is often asked to reminisce about Hank Aaron’s triumphant overtaking of Babe Ruth as the game’s all-time home run king back in 1974. But his front-row seat gave insights into things that were far from laudable. Aaron, a son of the South, was also a victim of the stench of the region’s racism. Aaron was hounded as he approached Ruth’s long-standing record of 714. The threatening letters and anonymous calls were often so vile they led the FBI to investigate.

“So Ralph (Garr) and I used to sit by him on the plane, and we were kind of in charge of taking the edge off and making him laugh,” says Baker. That was his job, as Baker saw it, even though he was closer in age to Aaron’s children than to The Hammer’s age (Baker, not yet of drinking age when he met the Aarons, often played hoops and skipped rope with Aaron’s kids outdoors while the more veteran Braves players and their spouses gathered socially inside the family home).

Baker would eventually move on from Atlanta, taking with him everything he could from Aaron, Orlando Cepeda, Cito Gaston, Paige. It was at his next stop that he bonded with a new set of brothers, in L.A., with Dodgers such as Downing, Reggie Smith, Davey Lopes, Steve Garvey. Baker, an established star, won a World Series ring there in 1981.

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Out on the road, Baker’s way stations were now manned by the likes of Joe Morgan and Pete Rose in Cincinnati, Willie Stargell and Dave Parker in Pittsburgh, Billy Williams and Ernie Banks in Chicago, by the ’70s and ’80s.  It was at last the Golden Age of baseball for Black players in the major leagues. Still, what he saw as the perfect setting for a meritocracy always seemed to have just enough of an undercurrent of race that there always seemed an unnecessary burden.

Baker has watched as his good friend Gaston, winner of two World Series as a manager, never receive serious consideration for the Hall of Fame. He hated seeing how Chicago chewed up his dear friend, Don Baylor; the pangs of guilt that came from succeeding “Groove” on the Northside as manager still gnaw at him. Regarding Baker’s unceremonious dismissal from the top job with the Giants, the Cubs, the Reds and the Nats? At each stop he took teams to the postseason. And he was always lauded for his deft handling of lightning rods like Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa and Harper, drawing from them some of their finest seasons.

And yet …  “If you’re an African American, if you don’t win it all, you’re considered a failure, you know what I mean?” he says softly. “I refuse to acknowledge that. That’s why I don’t read articles about me. Because, you know, why should somebody else control my self-esteem?”

Even clinching the AL West division title brought that flutter of ennui to the first manager to ever manage five different franchises to division titles. Baker didn’t understand the celebratory nature of the questions posed about the milestone.  Rather, he wondered aloud why such a record was necessary at all. “I don’t really think nothing, other than why was I on so many different teams,” Baker told reporters Friday after the Astros clinched their playoff spot. “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.”

It took three years of what appeared to be a forced retirement after he was let go in D.C. for Baker to get this chance to continue to win at his impressive clip. That the offer came from a team wearing a scarlet letter, one tainted by a cheating scandal in 2019, carried its own burden. Still, managing the Astros was a challenge Baker embraced as fervently as he did ostracized players such as Jose Altuve and Carlos Correa. He helped mute the hazing of the century, especially after the 2020 team reached the postseason despite all the venom. In the end, Baker again won praise as the perfect hire made by a far-from-perfect franchise.

“I think around Houston maybe people who had been associated with the organization said, ‘Who amongst the players that we know who are managing can handle the situation and all it’s going to bring,’” said Downing. “And when you look at the list, it’s his name’s going to pop up. Because it’s like Bryce and others say, he’s the guy who can do it.”

For all the above reasons, Baker differentiates between what he’s just accomplished in Houston as opposed to what his division-winning teams in San Francisco, Chicago, Cincinnati and Washington achieved. “This one is really special because of the negative vibes that we got from all over the world,” Baker told MLB.com. “(It’s) a great team. These guys are so together. That’s what I like more than anything. …Every time you win, it ranks higher than the last time, and you never get tired of winning.”

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Initially, Baker never thought he’d be given a chance to top what had occurred in all the other dugouts. He had been a finalist for the managerial position with the 2020 Phillies, but the job eventually went to Joe Girardi. So Baker again retreated to Northern California, to spend quality time with his wife, Melissa, his daughter, Natosha; grandchild Nova Love Smith, and his 92-year-old mother, Christine. He’d tend to his grapes, he figured, plant his roses, listen to his music, go fishing with Darren, as they had done during that “retirement.” He’d give his son the hitting instructor that Baker figures Darren, the 22-year-old prospect out of Cal Berkeley, deserves. And they’d continue to bond as they had so lovingly during the pandemic.

 Still, it stung.

It was Darren who ultimately provided the comfort he needed then. “He said perhaps I wasn’t supposed to have that opportunity, that perhaps it wasn’t the best place for me. I mean, that’s my son telling me what I’ve always believed, that maybe I have to wait to be where I was meant to be. That’s my son, with his beautiful knowledge and wisdom. He said maybe God’s got a better job, a better plan for me. A week later I was called by the Astros.”

Now Baker is in the spotlight once more. And no matter what happens this month, he knows that the 2021 regular season pulled him to within 13 wins of 2,000. Only 11 managers have ever reached that plateau. Ten are in the Hall of Fame.

Does Dusty Baker need a championship ring to gain entry to Cooperstown alongside La Russa and others? Harper fervently says no. “I mean, he’s done so much for this game as a manager and as a player as well,” says Harper. “Of course he wants that ring so bad, and I think that’s why he keeps going back to the game. Most of all, though, he just wants his teams to have success. He’s been so close so many times. He’s had an opportunity. The teams just haven’t been able to do it.  We’ve all wanted it for him. He’s such a great manager, he deserves it. As an opposing player, if we’re not there, I’ll definitely be rooting for Dusty,” Harper said before his Phillies were eliminated in the final week of the season.

As for Baker, he makes no secret that even if he secures that ring right here and now, he’s not stepping off into the sunset. “I will want to win more after that,” he said, the fire within burning as hot as ever.

It’s no secret that Baker does not have a contract for a 25th managerial season. “The thing about it is, just try not to think about it,” he says of the question no one in the Astros front office has yet to address. “You just gotta continue to carry on and be strong. A lot of other minorities are counting on it … ‘Hey, man, you gotta hang in there, you know, to give us a chance.’ Sometimes it’s a heavy burden, but, hey, I was chosen for it, you know what I mean?”

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Then there is this. Darren Baker, signed by the Nationals, will join the team for his first-ever spring training next year. Both the Nats and the Astros train in West Palm Beach, Fla., the town where Dusty Baker turned heads as a Braves phenom half a century ago.

Darren has already asked his father if they can be roommates come February.

“I never got to ask my dad that,” Baker said, thinking of his late father while looking back on his own departure from all he knew at age 19.  “Just think about it. I mean, man, this is 50 years apart from when I was in West Palm Beach. And Darren could be right there with me.”

Two Bakers, right where they are meant to be? It’s hard to imagine anything cooler than that.

(Top photo by Adam Glanzman / MLB Photos via Getty Images)

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