Dusty Baker: The Ultimate Player's Manager

Baker kept controversies down so his veteran players could be comfortable and focused. It worked well for most of his career, even if it ran into rocky ground in 2023.

What’s the job of a major league manager? Frequently, when fans talk about the job of a manager, they discuss it in terms of their pinch hitting and pitching decisions, or who they put in what place in the lineup. But studies show that the effect of these decisions are very small.

Another set of discussion is based on who is in the lineup, and this is more important than what spot a player bats in the lineup. But again, these decisions have only a modest effect on the outcome of a baseball season. Most managers can figure out who their best players are and how much to play them.

The most important job of a manager is to manage the men in his clubhouse. To sort through the personalities, quirks, and egos of the 26 men on his roster and to figure out how best to get all of them to focus on the team’s goals. The key part of the job is to get players to put aside their personal differences and the irritation of being with the same people day-in and day-out for six months. It’s to avoid controversies that become big media flare ups that cause unnecessary distractions.

Dusty Baker was known for 26 years as a players manager. And sometimes that is said as a back-handed compliment, because it presumes that the manager is focused on making his players happy over more important considerations that focus on strategic innovation and baseball tactics. But the back-handed assumption is totally wrong. The key job of the manager is to make his players happy because it makes the team work better.

And for 26 seasons in a major league dugout, including his final four for our Houston Astros, Dusty Baker was the ultimate players manager.

Dusty’s Record

Dusty Baker will retire having managed 4046 games over 26 major league seasons. Other retrospectives of Baker will focus on the number of games he won—which is 2,183, the 7th most in major league history.

But to me, the real measure of a manager is how often a front office trusted them to lead their team on the field. Baker’s 4046 games and 26 seasons are both 8th most in major league history. Every manager ahead of him on both lists has been inducted in Cooperstown.

Dusty was trusted by five different franchises to lead their team. And for each of those teams—the Giants, Cubs, Reds, Nationals, and Astros—Baker led each team to the playoffs.

Dusty in Houston

Baker was hired to manage the Astros in 2020 in the middle of their golden era. The job called less for tactical or strategic innovation than for maintaining the high standards than had been established already.

It was a job well suited to a man of Baker’s talents of relating to his players and getting them to avoid distractions. Baker seemed to be able to get players to all pull in the same direction, and for three of his four seasons in Houston, that direction was an AL West title.

In particular, Baker was successful at lowering the temperature of any flare-ups the reached the media. One example was a small and mostly forgotten contretemps in 2021 when starting pitcher Jake Odorizzi called a Baker decision to pull him after 5 innings and only 66 pitches “bullshit” and that the source of his frustration was “pretty frickin’ obvious.”

The next day, Odorizzi initiated a meeting with Baker, pitching coach Brent Strom, and general manager James Click to “clear the air" about Odorizzi’s frustrations.

We don’t know what Baker said in his meeting with Odorizzi, or what Strom and Click said, but we do know that whatever was said was effective. Odorizzi addressed the media the next day to say “We handled it like men. I said what I needed to say, and we all listened, we talked about it, thought about some stuff. It’s all good. I hold no ill will or anything moving forward.”

And as best anyone can tell, that final assessment from Odorizzi was correct. The issue went away and was rarely brought up again. That is good managing—handling a situation behind closed doors to reduce its effect in public and the media.

The need to reduce the temperature of media dustups and to get players to focus on winning games is more critical when you have good players, as the Astros do. Baker was one of the Astros most successful managers, but that is mostly due to the quality of the lineup that Baker got to run out every day. But the ability to get them to play to their best of their abilities brings value.

For Baker, that often meant a focus on trusting his veteran players and focusing on their comfort. For example, Baker would settle on a lineup and keep his key batters hitting in the same spot for long periods of time. That would lead to some lineup oddities where a lesser player would hit in a key spot and ahead of a better player. Baker was focusing on the long game—keeping his top players content—rather than maximizing his lineup each day.

Baker next to sign marking his accomplishments as the Astros manager. They will add one for 2023 that says A.L. West Champions.

A Trying 2023

The Baker approach of emphasizing the comfort of his veteran players worked well in 2021 and in 2022, which of course ended with not only 106 wins in the regular season but the team romping to an 11-2 run in the playoffs.

But the same approach did not seem to work as well in 2023, and it led to a great deal of criticism from Astros fans.

On Wednesday, the same day that the Astros scheduled Baker’s retirement press conference, Ben Clemens of Fangraphs published his “Managerial Report Card” for Baker. Clemens does this for each manager when they are eliminated from the playoffs, and focuses on their “postseason decision-making.”

Clemens was quite critical of Baker. In looking at the Astros batting, Baker earned an F from Clemens, who wrote “I’m going to tell you my complaints right at the start: Martin Maldonado played over Yainer Diaz a disturbing amount of the time, and Chas McCormick got shelved at the first sign of danger.”

Baker did better according to Clemens with pitching, but barely. Baker earned a D-. Clemens wrote “I found it strange that Baker buried [Hunter] Brown, a solid young starter who had a bad two month stretch at the end of the season, in favor of [Cristian] Javier and [Jose] Urquidy….It seems like Baker just picked his veterans, a move I generally disagree with.”

My reaction to Clemens’s criticisms of Baker in the playoffs is “well, what did you expect?” The preference for Baker’s favorites and veterans were a constant theme of the regular season, and I fully expected them to continue into the playoffs, as they did.

Some of Baker’s favorites this season were more veteran players, like Maldonado. Maldonado in in the lineup primarily for his strength handing the pitching staff and a number of the starting pitchers “demand” that Maldonado catch them. This decision made more sense in previous seasons when the alternative to Maldonado was another bad hitting catcher. But the decision had more consequence in 2023 when the alternative was Diaz, whose big power produced a127 wRC+, fifth best on the team.

Baker neve seemed to make McCormick a true every day play on the lines of his big stars like Altuve, Alvarez, and Tucker, or his veterans like Jose Abreu, despite the fact that McCormick 1) has been an above average hitter throughout his careers and 2) McCormick had a breakout season in 2023, slashing .273/.353/.489

Baker’s reluctance to play McCormick came to a head in early September when Chandler Rome of the The Athletic reported that “four people with knowledge of the team’s inner workings said that McCormick’s weight has become a talking point for Baker.” McCormick’s weight seemed fine based on the results, as he not only hit well, but also had a career high in steals (19) and graded out well defensively (5 DRS; 4 OAA).

The McCormick weight story revealed something more than the fact that Baker had made up out of whole cloth reasons not to play McCormick every day. It revealed that people inside the team felt that their best recourse to get one of their best players in the lineup was to leak information to the media. It signaled that they did not think they were getting a fair hearing from Baker on who should be in the lineup.

This was not the first time an Astros employee had gone to media in an effort to influence Baker. In May, general manager Dana Brown told reporters that he liked when Diaz was “in the lineup…I like that he has power, his OPS is climbing. Ultimately, I’d like to see him in the lineup more." Earlier in the season, Brown had said he thought Diaz needed 300 plate appearances to help his development as a hitter. When Brown went to the media, Diaz had only 75 plate appearances.

It was another sign that people with opinions did not think they were getting a fair hearing from Baker, who controlled the lineup card throughout his tenure as Astros manager.

Instilling Confidence and the Psychology of Managing

Dusty’s decision making in 2023 seemed to have a negative effect on the team. But the key word there is seemed. I cannot prove that it did.

I can show one Diaz’s numbers and compare them to Maldonado’s, but that does not prove playing Diaz more would have led to more wins. The advantage of playing Maldonado is not quantitative, but qualitative. His strength is in handling the pitching staff and playing on-field psychologist to his pitchers.

What is the effect of that? I can’t say. If Diaz caught more, would the Astros pitchers have given up more runs due to their discomfort with their backstop. Possibly, I can’t disprove it.

And it’s the same with Dusty’s broad preferences to cater to his veteran players and their comfort. Dusty’s rhetoric often focuses on instilling confidence in his players. In showing that he and the coaching staff “believes in” the players. In short, he focuses on putting players in the right state of mind to perform well.

It’s one theme that stretches across Dusty’s 26 seasons as a manager and his reputation as a player’s manager. He thinks about the game primarily in terms of the men he manages and how to get them to perform to the best of their capabilities. It’s why he tamps down media controversies and clubhouse contretemps. He reduces distractions for his players, whether with members of the media, with their teammates, or with their personal comfort.

Does it work? Over the broad sweep of his career, the answer is yes. It’s why five different organizations have brought him in to be their manager. Over the playoffs, maybe not. Clemens gave Baker poor grades for his decision making. Over the 2023, well, it’s hard to say. Dusty made moves in 2023 that were criticized by many Astros fans—including me—for not being urgent enough based on the team’s deficit to the Rangers in the AL West.

But Dusty had the last laugh. Even though it took all season, the Astros reeled in the Rangers on the last day of the regular season to win the division and earn a bye in the playoffs. Baker may have made suboptimal decisions in the ALCS, but the blowout losses in Games 6 and 7 suggest that no managerial move—or set of moves—made the difference in the series.

Dusty’s Legacy

Baker leaves the Astros as one of the two most successful managers in franchise history, along with AJ Hinch. Unsurprisingly, those are the two men who have led the Astros to their World Series titles.

His success in Houston is of course heavily dictated by getting to manage a team that was already at the top of baseball. But even with that, he had significant challenges to navigate in the Astros dugout. The team’s reputation needed a boost after the sign stealing scandal led to the firing of Hinch and Baker had to steer his team through the anger of opposing players and fans.

On the field, the 2020 suffered greatly from pitching injuries and free agent defections, and over the next three seasons, the team had to build up a new core of starting pitchers in Framber Valdez, Cristian Javier, and Jose Urquidy. The team had to rebuild a bullpen that seemed on the bring of collapse in 2020. By 2022, the Astros had the best pitching staff in baseball.

Baker deserves credit for continuing the Astros efforts to develop young players and integrate them into the team’s regulars. It’s a key reason the team won the World Series in 2022.

And that World Series was quite important for Baker as well. Baker had led all those teams into the playoffs. Yet until 2022, a World Series ring had eluded him. It was the only thing missing on his managerial resume. And the only thing that might have kept him out of the Hall of Fame.

No longer. He will be eligible to be voted into the Hall in December 2026 when the Modern Era committee meets at the Winter Meetings. Dusty is a shoo-in. And in August 2027, Dusty Baker will become the first manager of the Houston Astros to be inducted into Cooperstown.

Congrats, Dusty.