Joe Sheehan reminds us that Dusty Baker is still wrong:
…. A few years back, the blogosphere had a field day with Baker’s talk about “clogging the bases” while he was with the Cubs. We’re right back to that point again, with Baker not getting one of the most basic things about baseball: not making outs is the best thing you can do. Baker is fixated on the end result—the event that leads to a runner crossing the plate—and still doesn’t understand that in the big picture, keeping the line moving will put more runs on the board.
…. I’m not entirely sure how Dusty Baker, a man who owes his reputation as a manager in no small part to Barry Bonds, can have learned nothing from managing Bonds all those years. The Giants’ offense was capable of contending because Bonds would draw 100 walks a year and lead the league in OBP. Baker no doubt associates Bonds with homers and RBI, but it was the walks, the not making outs, that kept the line moving so that Jeff Kent and Ellis Burks and Moises Alou and others would face pitchers throwing from the stretch.
Yeah, well, I was there, and Baker was one of the reasons Jeff Kent won the NL MVP instead of Bonds in 2000. It was Baker who made sure everyone knew what a “gamer” Kent was, how much respect everyone in the clubhouse had for him, blah blah blah. The fact that Bonds out-produced him by about 40 runs, while making almost 100 fewer outs hardly mattered. Kent got his uniform dirty, Bonds was a prima donna who wouldn’t swing at crap to drive in a runner.
Baker and Sabean are the same man, in different roles. Neither one of them has what it takes to be a winner. Everything they’ve accomplished needs to be understood as happening under the shadow of the greatest player of all-time. Without Bonds, both of them would be out of baseball right now. No division titles, no pennants, no World Series, no five MVP’s in a row, nothing. Seriously, imagine what would have happened, imagine how the Giants next ten seasons would have looked like if Magowan had gone out and gotten somebody else in 1997, like, say, Frank Thomas, or Larry Walker, or Jim Thome, just regular great players. Bonds’ greatness made it all go away, all the mistakes, all the millions of dollars thrown away on mediocrity, all the at-bats wasted on the Shawon Dunston’s and Neifi Perez’s. That’s how great Bonds was, he took a team of misfits, led by two boneheads; and carried them to ten straight years of national attention, contention, and to the precipice of a championship.
Sabean and Baker are cut from the same cloth. Both men value experience over ability, speed over the ability to get on base. Both men overemphasize the wrong things, Sabean selects the wrong attributes and overpays for them, Baker chooses the wrong players and tells them to do the wrong things.
Bonds is gone, and both of these pretenders are still earning millions. How about a thank you?
8 Backtalkers
[...] Original post here [...]
Oh yes!
[...] John wrote a fantastic post today on “â¦. Two for one”Here’s ONLY a quick extractWe’re right back to that point again, with Baker not getting one of the most basic things about baseball: not making outs is the best thing you can do. Baker is fixated on the end result—the event that leads to a runner crossing the … [...]
I couldn’t have said it any better myself. Check out firejoemorgan.com — they lambasted Dusty Baker last week and it was a thing of beauty.
As Casey Stengel said “Managing is getting credit for home runs someone else hits”. Everyone knows that one player does not make a great ballclub, but Bonds was the closest there’s ever been (maybe Ruth in a season or two). As John alludes to with Jeff Kent, just imagine any of the Giants teams without Bonds. Would they really have been, any of them, that much better than what we have in 2008? I know the stats geeks (even though I’m one of them) poopoo “protection in the lineup”, but it’s very hard to judge Jeff Kent’s career as he’s generally had Hall Of Famers preceding or following him in the lineup, both in SF and Houston.
I liked Dusty when he was with the Giants, but what he’s done since then makes him perhaps the most damaging manager in the game. So well put, how on earth can one not see Bonds standing on first day after day and not think that benefits the club A LOT. I mean, this is conventional wisdom dating back to the 1880s (even if they looked at walks differently) – the point is to get on base.
And, I’m not saying this is all Dusty’s fault, but you have to wonder if Shawn Estes, Kerry Wood and Mark Prior might want to ring Dusty’s bell. TNSTAAPP, but those guys had a hell of start to their careers that came up to nothing. Where was the Buddha of baseball when Estes was losing his mind?
I once wrote what might be the last relatively kind words about Dusty to appear on the BP website. My feeling then, and I’m not sure I’ve changed my mind on this, is that the one area where so-called intangibles might matter is in the job of manager. Dusty was always a demonstrably awful in-game manager, and yes, he was (is?) too much in love with Proven Veterans. But it’s possible he shines in the area we can’t see from the stands: managing people. Players mostly claim to like playing for him … perhaps he gets the most out of marginal talent. Maybe no one else does as good a job managing Barry the Person. I don’t know this, but neither do I know it’s not true. Mostly what I’m saying is that Baker’s worst qualities are the ones we can quantify, his best qualities are the ones we can’t really know, so he’s a poster child for the Anti-Stathead Manager. And he certainly deserves what he gets when he jabbers on about clogging the bases. I’m just not convinced he hurts his team as much with his bone-headed strategies as he might help the team with his people skills. And if there is a place for such skills in baseball, the manager is the place they should reside … it doesn’t matter if this or that player is an asshole, what matters is that they produce, but part of a manager’s job is to create a work environment conducive to the players’ productivity.
I also think it’s silly to bring up Kent in this context. When I think of Bonds, Kent, and Baker, I think of Barry choking Kent in the dugout while Dusty looked on. That didn’t look like a manager who promoted Kent at the expense of Bonds. Looked more like someone who thought Kent was getting what he deserved.
I wouldn’t say Dusty Baker is a great, or even a good, manager. But the biggest part of the blame for the Giants’ problems, IMO, has been Sabean. We can chew Dusty’s ass for playing Neifi or Dunston, but it’s Sabean who continues to fill his rosters with the likes of those two. For better or worse, one of Baker’s last acts as a Giant was to take the team within a few outs of winning the World Series. He’s been gone for going on six years now, the team is worse than ever, and Sabean is still around. A GM of the “caliber” of Sabean can do a lot more to damage a franchise than can a manager like Baker. Even if Baker has become “the most damaging manager in the game,” he hasn’t done as much damage as Brian Sabean does every time he shows up for work.
“I think of Barry choking Kent in the dugout while Dusty looked on. That didn’t look like a manager who promoted Kent at the expense of Bonds. Looked more like someone who thought Kent was getting what he deserved.”
Of course, that was a couple of years after Kent won said MVP award and his ego had grown quite a bit and more and more players were annoyed by him (far more so than Bonds).
A guy at work asked if I still “liked the Giants.” I said that I did, but that my son, prompted by his love of the color green, had already said that he liked the Athletics. He asked how I thought that they’d do this season. He barely finished the sentence and I said, “100 loses.” “Really?” “Yup,” I said, “the only way they don’t lose 100 games is if the NL is as weak as many think and the Giants get lucky vs. the Pirates, Nationals, Marlins, Astros, etc.” Maybe I should turn to the Athletics. At least they show the institutional ability for self-realization and self-improvement.
How prophetic many of us have been about our Giants.