A baseball life fulfilled: Dusty Baker finally gets his ring
Dusty Baker dedicates the Astros’ World Series championship to his mom and dad. (1:10)
HOUSTON — Faith, Dusty Baker says, is the soul of humanity. And so he believes. He believes in the perfect guitar riff and the sound of the waves crashing ashore in Kauai. He believes in his family, which has supported him in this grueling career managing baseball teams for three decades. He believes in himself, even after all these could’ves and should’ves, and he believes in his players, because the moment he gives up on them, what’s left? Baker is the truest of believers, unwavering, and for much of his magnificent baseball life, his faith in men, borne of countless hours learning who they are and what fulfills them and why they play this game that every year ends in failure for 29 teams, defined him in all the wrong ways.
Never did Baker pay much mind to the criticism that he’d never managed a team to a World Series victory. Had he listened to it — to those who harped more on the few games he lost than the many he won — never would he have mustered the gumption to walk into a despondent Houston Astros clubhouse last October, minutes after the Atlanta Braves began celebrating their 2021 World Series championship on Houston’s field, and offered these words: “We’ll be back next year. We’re gonna win it.”
He believed it, too, as much as he believes in all the other things that matter to him. He believes because he expects to win all the time, which is irrational, of course, but greatness and rationality often find themselves at loggerheads.
They didn’t Saturday. The excellence of Baker’s Astros found itself on a crash course with the most logical outcome: that this team so larded with pitching, so crisp and elegant in the field, so timely with its hitting would dispose of the plucky Philadelphia Phillies. And so went Saturday, a day that will forever be remembered here as the one in which the Astros defeated the Phillies 4-1 in Game 6 to deliver the organization’s second World Series championship — and the first not haunted by the scandal that brought Baker here to begin with.
“I knew it was gonna happen sooner or later,” Baker told ESPN amid the on-field revelry, as he slipped on a gray championship T-shirt. “Stay around long enough, it’s gotta happen.”
Baker knows it’s not that simple. He’s 73 now, the oldest manager ever to capture a World Series. He entered this October having won 2,093 regular-season games and 40 more in the playoffs while being the first manager to guide five different organizations to the postseason. And still, the glory he tasted just once in his 19 seasons playing, in 1981 on the Los Angeles Dodgers’ championship-winning team, eluded him as a manager in the 2002 and 2021 World Series, damned him to be the one who was good but not good enough, tested his faith.
He inherited an impossible situation, summoned in 2020 to shepherd a team that had fired its manager and general manager following the revelation that the Astros cheated during their prior championship season in 2017. Baker was beloved around the game, and his presence could bifurcate that of the Astros, who would be supported fanatically in Houston, booed and loathed everywhere else. But Baker refused to separate his own reputation from the team’s. He embraced the Astros, warts and all, and tempered the negativity. He was brought in to play a role — more pop psychologist than in-the-weeds overlord — and he did it masterfully.
Even though they had cheated, he would not allow that to define their next incarnations. They would mold something new, something better. It wouldn’t erase the past, because nothing can, but it would stand alongside it as proof that this organization is more than a trash can used to relay oncoming pitch types to batters in real time. In a world where narratives super glue themselves to stories, Baker was intent on writing a competing one that would change the perspective of the Astros — and him, too.
“He has been an unbelievable manager,” said third baseman Alex Bregman, one of five remaining Astros from the 2017 team. “He has been an unbelievable human being, just on a personal level with every single person in our clubhouse. He loves the game of baseball. He has dedicated his life to this game, and he deserves it. He deserves it.”
None of this, Baker said, was an accident — the marauding through the American League to a 106-win season, the efficient disposal of the Seattle Mariners and New York Yankees in the playoffs, the come-from-behind World Series win. It did feel, though, as if fate and destiny and kismet, all the cosmic goodies that accompany belief, underpinned his triumph. Was it a coincidence that in Baker’s first game as manager in 1993, the leadoff hitter for the opposing team was Geronimo Peña, whose son, Jeremy, would rampage through the playoffs as a rookie and win World Series MVP for the Astros? Was it happenstance that the Astros, sustained by a fan base that shared Baker’s faith, became the first team to clinch a World Series at home since 2013, allowing for a raucous celebration to unfold before a crowd of 42,958 at Minute Maid Park, almost all of whom stayed to rejoice in the aftermath? Maybe. And also maybe not.
At the very least it was poetic, which met the moment, because Dusty Baker finally winning a World Series might not have ever happened without him sticking to his principles — relying on a starting pitcher longer than the modern game suggests, or relying on trusted hitters despite their deep struggles. In the past, unconditional faith hindered Baker, presaged his downfall. In 2022, it won him a championship. He let his players do what they do. He let the Astros be the best version of themselves.