Rosenthal: Even in his moment of World Series triumph, Dusty Baker didn’t forget

The clubhouse celebration was about to begin, but Dusty Baker had not yet placed his goggles over his eyes or popped open his bottle of champagne.

First, he had to address his team.

The Astros’ manager thanked his players for the greatest year of his life. He told them he loved them. And then he talked about his personal history as only as he can.

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“I’m telling you. Game 6,” Baker said Saturday night, with the FOX cameras rolling in the Astros’ clubhouse. “I went to bed last night. Game 6 …

Baker paused, grimaced, put his hand on his hip, then broke into a big smile as his players erupted in laughter.

“Game 6 has been my nightmare. I ain’t lying. I was like, damn that, man. We’re going to win today. I got Game 6 off our ass, off my ass. We’ve got JV’s (Justin Verlander’s World Series) win off his ass. And I’m telling you, you guys played your asses off. I didn’t have to do s—.”

It was classic Dusty, and a new Dusty, too. The Astros didn’t just win Game 6 of the World Series, 4-1, to eliminate the Phillies. They made Baker, 73, a champion for the first time as a manager, giving him a bookend to his title with the Dodgers as a player in 1981. The moment, more than a half-century in the making, brought joy to everyone who has ever come into contact with Baker, which seemingly is half the world’s population.

Game 6, it had to come in Game 6. Baker couldn’t stop talking about his past heartbreak in the penultimate game of a potential best-of-seven postseason series. Speaking to reporters afterward, he chose a different word than “nightmare,” using “nemesis” instead.

Remember? Who can forget?

In Game 6 of the 2002 World Series, when Baker was managing the Giants, he removed pitcher Russ Ortiz with a 5-0 lead, eight outs from winning a title. The Angels stormed back for a 6-5 victory in front of their home crowd, then won Game 7, 4-1.

The very next year, when Baker was managing the Cubs, his team held a 3-0 lead over the Marlins and was five outs away from winning Game 6 of the National League Championship Series. Then Steve Bartman happened. The Marlins rallied to win the game and series.

Finally, in last year’s World Series, Baker’s Astros returned to Houston, trailing the Braves three games to two. Nothing cataclysmic occurred in Game 6. Just the Braves shutting out the Astros, 7-0, to win the Series.

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Baker spoke often of what his father, the late Johnnie Baker Sr., told him after the Giants’ crushing loss to the Angels in 2002: “Man, after the way (you) lost that one, I don’t know if you’ll ever win another one.” Baker woke up Saturday morning thinking about what his father had said.

“I was, like, I didn’t really want to get to Game 6 again, but I was like, well, maybe this is how it’s supposed to be,” Baker said. “My dad didn’t mean anything negative … back in the old school, there was such thing as negative motivation.

“In the new school, negative motivation doesn’t work. But my dad was the kind of dude that I’d score four or five touchdowns, score 30 points, and I would ask him, ‘How did I do tonight in basketball?’ And my dad would tell me, ‘Pretty good.’ And I would be like, ‘Damn, Dad, I think I did great, you know? But ‘pretty good’ was his way of keeping me motivated.”

Through 25 seasons as a manager, tenures with five different clubs and more than 4,000 games in the dugout, regular season and postseason, Baker has never lost that motivation. His wife, Melissa, said he was driven not so much by his father’s words as he was by something else.

“Just pure love for the game,” Melissa said. “He always said, whether he won or not — and of course he wanted to win — he loves the game. And nothing would change that.”

The game, though, did not always love Baker back. His son, Darren, 23, noted, “a lot of sacrifice, years and years, trials and tribulations leading up to this moment.” But Darren, a second baseman in the Nationals’ system, also said his father never lost his competitive spirit.

“It’s kind of what drove him back to the game,” Darren said. “He lives for it.”

Actually, Baker lives for lots of things. His family and friends. Fishing. His wine and solar-energy businesses. Music — he had Big Mama Thornton, who originally recorded the song, “Hound Dog,” made famous by Elvis Presley, playing in his office before Game 6.

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But mostly, Baker lives for people. He connects with all races, male and female, young and old. His sensitivity — and powers of observation — are two reasons he remains an effective manager, the oldest to win a World Series.

For the Astros, coming out of the sign-stealing scandal, Baker also was a human shield. He had faded from prominence, serving as a special advisor to the Giants after the Nationals dismissed him in Oct. 2017, following seasons in which they won 95 and 97 games but were eliminated each year in the fifth game of the Division Series. In Aug. 2018, he told me he wasn’t sure he wanted to manage again.

“I was thinking: Every team I inherited was a bottom-dwelling team, except Washington,” Baker said then. “Most of the time you’re not going to inherit a first-division team. You’re going to get a losing team. I don’t know how much time I have to bring another team back, or if I have the desire to do so.”

Then came the Astros, who reached the ALCS in the three seasons before they hired Baker, and have returned to at least that round of the playoffs in each of the three seasons since.

Baker, beloved and skilled, was the perfect hire for the franchise after commissioner Rob Manfred penalized the club for stealing signs illegally in 2017 and 2018, prompting owner Jim Crane to fire general manager Jeff Luhnow and manager AJ Hinch.

“Like I’ve said many, many times, he came here at the right time,” second baseman Jose Altuve said.

Baker answered reporters’ questions, deflected attention from his players, kept the team among the game’s elite. In his first season, the pandemic-shortened 2020 campaign, the Astros made it to Game 7 of the ALCS. In his second, they lost the World Series. And in his third, they won a title without taint, as opposed to their previous championship in 2017.

The Astros’ triumph did not vindicate the franchise or validate what happened in 2017 and 2018, the seasons in which the team stole signs illegally. But only three position players remain from those clubs — Altuve, first baseman Yuli Gurriel and third baseman Alex Bregman. This was a different team with a different manager and GM, playing under stricter rules regarding electronic sign stealing.

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Not that opposing fans wanted to hear it.

“I think that’s what drove this team. That’s what motivated them,” Baker said. “The boos and the jeers we got all over the country, it bothered these guys, but it also motivated them at the same time. And it wasn’t an us against the world thing. It was more a come-together-even-closer-type thing.”

Pitcher Lance McCullers Jr. called Baker “a stabilizing force,” and hardly anyone would dispute the accuracy of that assessment. Yet before the series began, one of the newest Astros, Trey Mancini, spoke of the small gestures that define the man.

His gifts of banana pudding, for example. Some Astros players fancy that flavor, Mancini said, so Baker will seek out local places on the road, buy the pudding and place it in the players’ lockers. Before Game 3 of the ALCS in New York, Baker did something even more meaningful for Mancini, visiting St. Patrick’s Cathedral and bringing him back a rosary (Baker assumed Mancini was Catholic, knowing the player went to Notre Dame).

“For the month prior, I had been scuffling,” Mancini said. “In a weird way, it gave me a little confidence, and helped me out.”

Mancini, though, continued to struggle, and was 0-for-18 in the postseason before a knee injury to Gurriel forced him into the Astros’ lineup at first base for Game 6. During batting practice, Baker engaged Mancini in conversation. Mancini had struck out in his only at-bat after replacing Gurriel in Game 5. Baker, watching Mancini take a 1-1 fastball for a strike, determined from the player’s body language that he was uncertain at the plate, caught in between.

Behind the batting cage, Baker had a message for Mancini: “Trust your instincts. Have a plan. Stick to it.”

Sure enough, Mancini hit a single to right in his first at-bat. He wasn’t one of the Astros’ heroes, not on a night when Yordan Alvarez hit a mammoth three-run homer, Framber Valdez pitched six brilliant innings and shortstop Jeremy Peña became the first rookie to win Series MVP. But Baker’s work with Mancini demonstrated he isn’t just there for his stars, even though he has managed some of the biggest in the game, including Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa and Bryce Harper.

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Baker is available to anyone and everyone, and his players love him for it.

“We wanted this for him,” closer Ryan Pressly said.

Catcher Martín Maldonado agreed, saying, “I couldn’t ask for a better manager.”

Astros rally around their manager, chanting “Dusty! Dusty! Dusty!” after the World Series win.

🎥 @MLBONFOX | @astros pic.twitter.com/ix0E1724bI

— The Athletic MLB (@TheAthleticMLB) November 6, 2022

In the postgame interview room, Baker said his prevailing emotion was not relief. He mentioned sheer joy. And he mentioned gratitude.

“I’ve had some ups and downs, some disappointments, you know?” Baker said. “But those disappointments make you stronger or they break you. So this has kind of been the story of my life where people tell me what you can’t do. Even now, I won a bunch of games, my teams won a bunch of games, and all I hear about is what you don’t do, you don’t like this or you don’t like young players, you can’t handle pitchers, you can’t, and I’m like, well, damn, what did I do?”

In this Series, too, Baker heard talk about his strategic shortcomings. Consider Game 3, when the Astros fell behind, two games to one. Baker allowed McCullers to face the top of the Phillies’ order, only to see the pitcher allow two more home runs, increasing the Astros’ deficit from 4-0 to 7-0.

The bigger lead enabled the Phillies to stay away from their better relievers, but Baker’s decision did not cost the Astros the game. His team’s 11-2 record this postseason amounted to a rather loud answer to his detractors. Yet, when a reporter mentioned to Baker that he was viewed as a great manager entering the Series, Baker interrupted him.

“By some people,” Baker said.

“I think by most people,” the reporter replied.

“Some people,” Baker said again.

The criticism grates him still. Even in his moment of triumph, Baker wasn’t about to forget.

“After a while I quit listening to folks telling me what I can’t do,” Baker said. “All that does is motivate me more to do it because I know there’s a bunch of people in this country that are told the same thing, and it’s broken a lot of people. But my faith in God and my mom and dad always talking to me made me persevere even more.

“My mom, she told me a number of times, you know, like to be African-American you got to be twice as good to achieve the same thing. I heard that over and over and over. And my dad would always tell me when I would get in fights and stuff and he would tell me, what would Jackie (Robinson) do? And I was like, Jackie wasn’t a turn-the-cheek brother either. I’m damn sure not a turn-the-other-cheek dude, you know what I mean?

“But you learn to co-exist with different people in the workplace.”

He has done it for 55 years now. As a player, Baker was in the on-deck circle with the Braves when Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s all-time home run record in 1974. As a manager, he was with the Giants when Bonds broke Mark McGwire’s single-season home run record in 2001.

He survived prostate cancer in 2002, an irregular heartbeat and what he called a “mini-stroke” in 2012. But he endured to become ninth on the all-time list with 2,093 regular-season victories as a manager. With 102 more wins, he would pass Sparky Anderson for sixth on the all-time list.

Don’t bet against Baker achieving that milestone. He has always said if he wins one championship, he wants to win two. Crane almost certainly will give him that chance, with largely the same cast. Verlander is expected to decline his $25 million player option for next season and become a free agent, but Crane won’t part with him easily. Gurriel, outfielder Michael Brantley, infielder Aledmys Díaz and catcher Christian Vázquez are among the club’s other potential free agents.

Ah, but the Hot Stove can wait. First, Baker has a championship to savor. He spoke, as he often does, about Aaron, one of his great influences. Last year, Baker said, was the year of Aaron, who died on Jan. 22, 2021. He didn’t want to admit it then, but maybe the Braves were supposed to defeat his team.

Saturday night, finally, it was Baker’s turn. He said he was counting the outs in the eighth and ninth, thinking of his late mother, father and brother, of “all the guys that motivated me and were in my corner,” listing Aaron, Don Baylor, Joe Black, Roy Campanella, Jim Gilliam and Al Kaline. “And I was thinking, you know, please, no drama in the ninth,” Baker said. “And I was saying, (late Astros great) J.R. (Richard), man, give ’em your slider.”

Pressly might not have Richard’s slider, but his breaking stuff is pretty darned good, and he pitched 11 innings without allowing an earned run in the postseason, finishing off the Phillies with a scoreless ninth. For Baker, it was the perfect ending. And at the conclusion of his news conference, he imparted one last life lesson.

“One thing I hear my dad always telling me, ‘Try to do the right thing.’ And sometimes that’s tough,” Baker said. “Sometimes you want to do the selfish thing. But the right thing, whatever that is in your mind, that’s what I try to do.”

He has always done right by the game, so the baseball gods had to come around at some point. Had to exorcise his Game 6 demons. Had to honor his selflessness. Had to do right by him.

The Athletic’s Andy McCullough contributed to this story.

(Top photo: Carmen Mandato / Getty Images)