Dusty Baker, Job Security, and the Hall of Fame

The Astros knew exactly what they were doing when they hired Dusty Baker to manage the team in the wake of commissioner Rob Manfred’s report on the club’s illegal sign-stealing efforts during the 2017 and ’18 seasons. The septuagenarian skipper’s old-school reputation stood out as an effort to rebrand an analytically-inclined organization that Manfred criticized as “insular” and “problematic,” to say nothing of outside criticisms of the team’s methods as “dehumanizing.” Baker’s human touch and his skill at dealing with the media have helped to offset some of the anger and hostility directed at the team by fans, while the Astros have continued their deep postseason runs, presumably without the benefit of illegal electronic help.

The Astros limped to a 29-31 record during the COVID-19-shortened 2020 season due to myriad injuries and underperformances, but in the expanded postseason, they went on a tear, upsetting the higher-seeded Twins in the Wild Card Series and the A’s in the Division Series before falling to the Rays in the AL Championship Series, that after rallying back from a three-games-to-none deficit. This year, despite a rotation full of question marks, they overcame an 18-17 start, took over sole possession of first place in the AL West for good on June 21, and breezed to the AL West title with a 95-67 record. Since then, they outlasted both the White Sox in the Division Series and the Red Sox in the AL Championship Series.

In doing so, Baker became just the ninth manager to win pennants in both leagues, and before that, the first manager to win division titles with five different teams; he had already become the first manager to take five different teams to the postseason last year.

That record of winning divisional titles with five teams, in the now-72-year-old manager’s view, isn’t exactly cause for celebration. As he told reporters after the Astros clinched, “I don’t really think nothing, other than why was I on so many different teams… 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.”

Indeed, at three of his previous four stops, Baker departed after seasons with at least 90 wins and postseason berths. In 2002, he won 95 games while guiding the Giants to their first World Series since 1989; it was the fourth time in six years his team had topped 90 wins, and third with a playoff berth. Yet due to a strained relationship with managing partner Peter Magowan, the Giants didn’t offer him a contract after the 2002 World Series, by which point Baker’s lame-duck status had led him to envision greener pastures. He landed with the Cubs, and nearly took them back to the World Series in his first season (more on which below), but by his fourth season there (2006) the team was 66-96 and in need of a new direction. The Cubs let his contract expire, the only time he left a losing team.

In 2008 Baker took over the Reds; after back-to-back, sub-.500 finishes, his team won 91 games and the NL Central in 2010, their first postseason berth since 1995, and he received a two-year extension. After another sub-.500 season, a 97-win campaign and another NL Central title netted him another two-year extension, but after 90 wins and a Wild Card berth in 2013, he got the axe. Three years later, he was hired by the Nationals on a two-year deal, but despite back-to-back NL East titles and seasons of 95 and 97 wins, the team let his contract lapse, deciding it needed a change of direction.

To Baker, the subject of race looms over his unique resumé. “If you’re an African American, if you don’t win it all, you’re considered a failure, you know what I mean?” he recently told Claire Smith for The Athletic.

Even at this juncture, Baker conspicuously does not have a contract for next season, leaving open the possibility of another parting of the ways (he’s said he’s not ready to retire). “The thing about it is, just try not to think about it,” he told Smith regarding his status. “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?”

Astros owner Jim Crane did say recently, “Dusty deserves another shot for next year. We’ll see where it goes. He’s done a great job here, and I don’t think there is any reason we wouldn’t visit about [a new contract] after the World Series… I love Dusty. We’ll put it like that. You take it from there.”

Baker has won more games than all but 11 other managers in baseball history, 10 of whom are in the Hall of Fame; the exception is Bruce Bochy, whose three World Series titles make him a likely honoree for the 2023 Today’s Game Era Committee ballot, assuming he doesn’t come out of retirement to take another job (his name has been floated in connection with the managerial searches of the Padres and Mets, albeit more in a theoretical sense than a practical one).

Has Baker done enough to get to Cooperstown himself? The question will linger throughout the World Series and probably beyond, particularly if the Astros fall to the Braves. I don’t have a managerial JAWS to bring to such an evaluation, but it’s worth diving into some comparisons to frame the discussion.

While just over one-third of all Hall of Famers (112 out of 333) managed a major league team at one time or another, only 23 are enshrined as managers, as opposed to as players or executives, roles that they may have also fulfilled during their careers. Of the 22 besides Rube Foster, whose pivotal career also included his starring as a pitcher in pre-Negro Leagues Black baseball and founding the Negro National League in 1920, only four did not win a World Series.

Two of those four, Frank Selee and Ned Hanlon, spent the bulk of their careers managing before the AL-NL World Series began in 1903, but each won at least one of the lesser known 19th-century postseason series. Selee managed from 1890 to 1905, leading the Boston Beaneaters to five NL pennants. In 1892, his Beaneaters beat the runner-up Cleveland Spiders in the last of the eight 19th-century “World’s Series” that were conducted following the regular season; from 1884-90, those series had pitted the NL champions against the American Association champions, but the rival league collapsed after the 1891 season, and so the series was revived by giving the second-place team a shot at the title.

Hanlon managed from 1889 to 1907, leading the Orioles to three NL pennants and the Brooklyn Superbas to two. After their pennant wins in 1894, ’95, and ’96, the Orioles played the NL runner-up teams in the Temple Cup, losing to the Giants in ’94 and the Spiders in ’95, but sweeping the Spiders in ’96 and, as the second-place team, beating Selee’s Beaneaters in ’97. The novelty of the Temple Cup quickly waned, as MLB official historian John Thorn wrote, and after the fourth go-round, the NL returned the cup to donor W. C. Temple.

The other two managers without a World Series win are Wilbert Robinson (1902, ’14-31) and Al Lopez (1951-69), each of whom won two pennants but lost twice in the Fall Classic. Both managed at a time when only the league’s pennant winner made the postseason, and both did so for a long time following lengthy careers as light-hitting catchers. Robinson, like fellow Hall of Famers John McGraw, Hughie Jennings, and Willie Keeler, was most notably a member of Hanlon’s powerhouse Orioles of the mid-1890s. A colorful and congenial manager of teams that were often short on talent, he was so popular that the Dodgers teams he piloted from 1914-31 were generally known as the Robins when they weren’t being referred to as the “Daffiness Dodgers” for their creative approach to bad baseball. Robinson’s teams went just 1399-1398 (.500) over the course of his career (which also included a brief, dismal stint as the Orioles’ player-manager in 1902) and only landed in the first division in six of his 18 full seasons. He’s in the Hall as much for his outsized personality and for helping to build the Dodgers-Giants rivalry via his own personal conflicts with McGraw as for winning anything.

Lopez, who played under Robinson at the outset of his career, had the misfortune of managing some very good Cleveland and Chicago White Sox teams at a time when the Yankees were the game’s preeminent powerhouse. In addition to the pennants he won with Cleveland in 1954 (via a 111-43 record but a loss to the Giants in the World Series) and Chicago in ’59, his teams finished second 10 times in a 15-year span, nine of them as runners-up to the richer and more talented Yankees. All of his full-season teams finished with a .525 winning percentage or higher, and only once did they slip below fourth place. For his career, his .584 winning percentage (1410-1004) is eighth among managers with at least 1,000 games and fourth among those with 2,000.

Had Lopez managed in the era of division play, with or without the Wild Card, he might have added a championship, though the plight of Baker suggests that’s hardly an automatic. Baker has won eight division titles — two apiece with the Giants, Reds, and Nationals, plus one apiece with the Cubs and Astros — while qualifying as a Wild Card team twice and as a number-six seed in last year’s expanded format. Yet his teams have only won seven out of 17 postseason series and 38 out of 78 postseason games (.487). Not that there’s shame in being below .500 in that context; among Hall of Fame managers, Bobby Cox (.493), McGraw (.481), and Dick Williams (.477) are below the line, as are Baker contemporaries Davey Johnson (.490), Joe Maddon (.478), Lou Piniella (.460), and Mike Scioscia (.438), more on which below. Yet each of those aforementioned managers won at least one World Series, with Williams winning two and McGraw three.

Baker’s near-misses in the postseason have been painful ones. In Game 6 of the 2002 World Series, his Giants were up 5-0 on the Angels, nine outs away from a championship, but flagging starter Russ Ortiz and three relievers allowed three runs in the seventh, and then the bullpen yielded three more in the eighth; the Angels won the game, then beat the Giants in Game 7 as well. A year later, Baker’s Cubs were up 3-0 on the Marlins in the eighth inning of Game 6, five outs away from the franchise’s first trip to the World Series since 1945, but after fan Steve Bartman interfered with left fielder Moises Alou as he tried to catch Luis Castillo’s foul ball, all hell broke loose. Castillo reached base via a walk, and soon enough, an eight-run rally ensued. The Cubs, after losing that one, lost Game 7 as well.

That stinging NLCS defeat was the first of Baker’s six postseason series losses in a row, a stretch that continued to 2017 and that included other missed opportunities. His Reds squandered a two-games-to-none lead over the Giants in the 2012 Division Series, while his Nationals let slip a two-games-to-one lead over the Dodgers in ’16, and blew a 4-1 third-inning lead in Game 5 of the ’17 Division Series against the Cubs when Max Scherzer faltered in relief. It happens.

Obviously, bad luck is part of that litany — the Bartman play is one of the most infamous instances of fan interference in baseball history — but the volume of losses has fed into a general criticism of Baker’s in-game tactical skills, particularly his bullpen management. As I noted at length when Baker was hired by the Astros, he has changed with the times with regards to some of the foibles scrutinized by statheads, improving notably with regards to avoiding the overworking of his starting pitchers, to putting higher on-base percentage hitters atop his lineups, and to laying off the sacrifice bunts.

Baker’s Astros are an extension of that trend; only four times in the 2020 or ’21 regular seasons did one of their starters throw 110 or more pitches on his watch, which is tied (with three other teams) for 12th in the majors; none has thrown over 120. His non-pitchers’ 22 sacrifice bunt attempts in the two years is tied for 16th in the majors, while his team’s .341 OBP out of the leadoff spot is 11th (and their wRC+ fifth). Young and previously unestablished players such as Kyle Tucker, Chas McCormick, and Jake Meyers have fared well on his watch; there’s even a method to his madness of batting Tucker sixth or seventh, as contributor Owen McGrattan showed. Likewise for his rotations; this year’s group was projected for the majors’ 18th-highest WAR in our Positional Power Rankings but despite dealing with some injuries — as did every other pitching staff in the post-pandemic season — they finished 10th (fifth in the AL) partly on the strength of good seasons by 24-year-old rookie Luis Garcia, 26-year-old José Urquidy, and 27-year-old Framber Valdez, none of whom had made more than eight starts in a season prior to his arrival in Houston.

Returning to the Hall question, we can get a clearer picture of Baker’s standing by limiting the comparisons to managers whose careers took place mostly in the division play era or later, which is to say 1969 onward. A total of 35 have notched at least 1,000 wins, eight of whom are enshrined as managers:

By comparison, Baker’s numbers are a bit light, mainly in the pennant and World Series categories, as we already know. Note that none of those Hall of Famers began their careers as managers after 1979. Here’s how Baker stacks up among his top contemporaries, those who first managed after 1980 and have won at least 1,000 games and a pennant:

I’ve ordered these by regular season winning percentage but the table is sortable; you can see that Baker is tied for first in postseason appearances, second in wins (and losses) and third in games above .500, though the manager with the most titles from among this group and, as noted, the best shot at the Hall, is the one who’s sub-.500. This cutoff works well with regards to the Manager of the Year Award, which wasn’t established until 1983. Baker won in 1993, ’97, and 2000; Cox and La Russa have each won the award four times, while Maddon, Piniella, Bob Melvin and Buck Showalter are the others who have won three times (the last two lack pennants, hence their omission above).

From among this group, so far only Johnson, Manuel and Piniella have landed on Hall of Fame ballots, specifically the Today’s Game Era Committee ones. Piniella received seven votes in 2017 and 11 in ’19, one short of election, while Johnson and Manuel fell in the “fewer than five votes” no-man’s land in the latter year. While his 1990 Reds did win the World Series, Piniella has just the one pennant and lower regular season and postseason winning percentages than Baker; his own playoff resumé, aside from 1990, includes an impressive and exciting win for the Mariners over the Yankees in the 1995 Division Series but also three first-round exits, including back-to-back ones in 2007 and ’08 with the Cubs, the latter when his team was the NL’s top seed. He also fell short of the World Series with the 116-win Mariners in 2001, consigning that juggernaut to an awkward place in history. I don’t like to play the lowest common denominator game when it comes to Hall of Famers — there’s no way in hell that voters should point to Harold Baines or Jack Morris as standards — and Piniella hasn’t actually been elected, but if a panel does conclude that he’s Hallworthy, I don’t see how Baker isn’t, even sans title.

Based on the numbers above, Scioscia has similar qualifications to Piniella (minus a win percentage-sapping stint with the basement-dwelling Devil Rays), so I don’t see how voters could split those particular hairs if Sweet Lou is elected. Francona and Maddon are probably on their way to Cooperstown, though their last lines have yet to be written. The one that stands out to these eyes as a candidate is Leyland, who had his share of postseason heartbreak in Pittsburgh and Detroit, and some dead-end stints that compromised his winning percentage, but also the three pennants and the unlikely championship with the 1997 Marlins. That he hasn’t even been on a ballot yet speaks to the fact that voters are barely getting started in evaluating this group.

Returning to the subject of race, one factor that should work in Baker’s favor, beyond the magnetic personality and rich life experience that rightfully endear him to the media, is his role as a pioneer against the backdrop of Major League Baseball’s distressingly limited number of opportunities afforded managers of color. When Baker was named manager of the Giants, Cito Gaston — a former teammate of Baker’s in Atlanta — had just become the first Black manager to win a World Series, 18 years after Frank Robinson had become the game’s first Black manager and 45 years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. Gaston’s Blue Jays won again in 1993, but not until Baker took the Giants to the series in 2002 did a second Black manager even win a pennant, and since then, only Ron Washington (2010-11) and Dave Roberts (2017-18, ’20) have done so; the latter’s win with the Dodgers last year made him just the second Black manager (and first Asian one, for he’s biracial) to win a World Series. Meanwhile, among Latino managers, only Ozzie Guillen (2005), Alex Cora (2018) and Dave Martinez (2019) have won a World Series. Thus far, all of the enshrined managers besides Foster have been white.

Considering both the context of Baker’s standing among managers of color, and among the long-lasting skippers who mostly dealt in the three-tiered playoff format, I do believe Baker has a reasonably strong case for the Hall of Fame, if not an airtight one. Winning a championship would certainly help to solidify that, but regardless of what happens over the next four to seven games, I believe that in the coming decade, as the voters evaluate him and his contemporaries, he’ll wind up on the inside. First he has to retire, but given his current success and his zeal for continuing to manage, one can hardly blame him for wanting to continue.