WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — It is the burning question every manager or would-be manager in baseball must have wrestled with all winter, managers being human, and humans being egocentric: What would I have done if it were my team? The question, with its probing undertones of morality and leadership, would have persisted whether you are old or new, far removed from the Houston Astros’ sign-stealing scandal or right in the gurgling belly of it.
Dusty Baker is all of those things. At 70, and with 1,863 wins under his belt, he is the oldest and winningest manager in baseball — but he also is barely three weeks into his present job. Having been essentially out of the game the past two years, he was at most a curious onlooker as the Astros scandal roared into public consciousness this offseason — but now, as the man that franchise hired Jan. 29 to steer it out of the morass, he is in some ways its public face.
So what, one must ask, would Dusty Baker have done if he, instead of A.J. Hinch, had been the Astros’ manager in 2017 and 2018 — when, according to a Major League Baseball investigation, players and other personnel conspired to steal signs from opposing catchers and transmit them in real time to Astros hitters?
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There are, it would seem, three possible answers: Use one’s moral authority to put an immediate end to the scheme. Signal one’s tacit acceptance of it by ignoring it completely. Or the choice Hinch ultimately made: Convey one’s displeasure — in Hinch’s case, via a baseball bat to the illicit video monitor the Astros used to steal signs — but otherwise let it go in the name of peace and winning. That choice, in the end, cost Hinch his job.
But on a quiet morning in mid-February, as Baker prepared for one of his first few days in the new job, with the Astros’ pitchers and catchers spread out before him across the back fields at Ballpark of the Palm Beaches, he contemplated the question — which, managers being human, must have crossed his mind — and let it go by, as if it were a curveball he knew was coming.
“I can honestly say I’ve never asked myself that,” Baker said. “I try to never be judgmental. Nobody knows exactly what’s going on in someone else’s soul.”
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But the silence that followed revealed the real answer: Baker didn’t ask himself the question because he didn’t need to — and he didn’t need to because he already knew the answer. More than once this spring training, he has said firmly, “It won’t happen on my watch.” It was future tense but with enough clarity that you could see straight through to the past.
“The question I keep coming back to,” he said when he finally spoke again, “is why?”
The “why” was what brought the Astros, in the fallout from the scandal, to Baker in the first place, rousting him from his comfortable life back in Sacramento as a businessman, family man and part-time special assistant for the San Francisco Giants. Why had Hinch’s players done it? Why did nobody have the right combination of moral conviction and leadership vision to stop it?
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Baker, the Astros think, is that person. When he hired Baker — on a one-year deal with a team option for 2021 — Houston owner Jim Crane called him a “person of high integrity.” Pitcher Justin Verlander cited his “statesman presence.” Center fielder George Springer labeled him “a cool cat.” New general manager James Click, who was hired to replace the fired Jeff Luhnow a week after Baker was hired to replace Hinch, said Baker is “the perfect person for this situation.”
Among other attributes, Baker is baseball’s ultimate crisis manager. In San Francisco, he had Barry Bonds at the height of steroids hysteria. He kept Bonds and Jeff Kent from each other’s throats. In Chicago, he had Sammy Sosa. He was the losing manager in the Steve Bartman game. Most recently, in Washington, he took over a star-crossed team — whose 2015 season featured closer Jonathan Papelbon wringing the neck of superstar Bryce Harper — and led it to back-to-back National League East titles in 2016 and 2017. And then he was let go.
“I’ve been through some stuff,” he said.
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And he’s right. The above accounting entails only his managing career and not, for example, his coming of age as a big leaguer with Hank Aaron’s 1968 Atlanta Braves in the post-Jim Crow-era South, or surviving prostate cancer and a stroke, or nearly going bankrupt as a younger man because of tax issues.
When it was suggested his deep well of personal experience and his moral center are what attracted the Astros to him, Baker cautioned, “I ain’t perfect now.”
And what attracted Baker to the Astros? What made him answer their call, fly in for his interview and accept the one-year deal they offered — which effectively makes him a lame duck from Day 1? First, understand he didn’t immediately leap at the prospect. He had just become a grandfather for the first time this winter when daughter Natosha gave birth to a boy. His son, Darren, was about to begin his junior season as the starting second baseman at Cal, where Dusty has been a fixture these past two years, in the back row on the first base side, leaning back against the railing.
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Baker asked his family for their input, and they all told him to go for — and ultimately accept — the Houston job.
“I was happy,” he said, “but I wasn’t satisfied.”
The lure of the Astros job was obvious: Despite everything that has transpired — the scheme, the scandal, the investigation, the firings, the apology, the backlash, the industry-wide vitriol, the threat of bean balls — it was a plum job. Baker is used to taking over underachieving teams and turning them into winners. This team was coming off 107 wins and an American League pennant. What the Houston job represented was one final chance — a “last hurrah,” he called it — to win the World Series title that has eluded him as a manager.
“It was a great opportunity, a great chance to win,” he said. “The only two things I’ve missed in life are the love of grandparents, who died before I was born, and a world championship. And I’ve got a chance at a world championship.”
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So he made his way to West Palm Beach, where the Astros, his new team, share a complex with the Nationals, his old team. He moved into his new office, unpacking a new scented candle he had picked up in Hawaii, where the Bakers own land. (“I like my room smelling sweet,” he said.) And he dived headlong into the morass.
When the Astros held a news conference at the start of spring training to apologize for their transgressions, the speakers were Crane, who as owner had overseen the overseers who lost their jobs over the scandal; José Altuve and Alex Bregman, two of the team’s most visible players; and Baker, who in 2017, the year the Astros rode their scheme all the way to the World Series title, was managing the Nationals.
“All you can do is ask for forgiveness for your past,” Baker said. “But you still have to live in the present.”
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When Baker speaks, whether because of his age or his inflection, the words sound as if they are bursting with wisdom. “It’s going to take a while to move on,” he said at one point. “You don’t just move on because you say, ‘Move on.’ ”
“I’m a Gemini, so I’m two people,” he said another time when asked about the Astros’ analytics-focused philosophy. “So I believe in some old and some new, and I believe we can combine the two. I think that’s the road to success.”
For Baker and the Astros, barely a week into spring training, the road to success already has revealed untold dangers and twists, with who knows how many more to come. But each gives the other the best chance to get through it and find their own version of redemption. Dusty Baker has been through some stuff, and so have the Houston Astros.
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