What is Dusty Bakers true Cubs legacy? Ask his former players, who love him

June 21, 2024

Doug Glanville was called into Dusty Baker’s office at Wrigley Field to answer a question that had only one acceptable answer:

“You play the infield, right?”

Glanville was confused. It was the end of the 2003 season. He was 33. This was his seventh year in the majors. He was an outfielder. Infield? Hell, he had barely played right field with the Chicago Cubs.

“I was like, ‘The infield as in the dirt?’” Glanville said, noting that he hadn’t done so since Little League.

Baker looked a little annoyed. The Cubs had just clinched a playoff spot on the next-to-last day of the season. The meeting was about Baker’s playoff roster.

“He’s like, ‘Let me just ask you again: You play infield, right?’” Glanville said. “Oh, OK. I think I get it now. It dawned on me that this is the only way I can make the playoff roster, as I had to be the emergency infielder in case that we had (an) injury or whatever. I’d be the third guy off the bench.”

So Glanville made the playoff roster as an extra infielder. Thankfully, he noted, he didn’t have to test his Little League muscle memory. But what Glanville did do is hit an RBI triple in the top of the 11th inning to give the Cubs a 5-4 lead in Game 3 of the National League Championship Series.

That’s the magic of Baker.

“I root for Dusty Baker,” Glanville told me earlier this year when I contacted him for the oral history of the 2003 Cubs.

Baker, 74, announced his retirement from managing Wednesday, two days after the Houston Astros lost Game 7 of the ALCS at home to the Texas Rangers. Baker finally got his World Series title as a manager last season with Houston and was trying to make his third consecutive World Series with the team.

“I certainly didn’t want to be the guy that was remembered for not winning,” Baker told me about that 2022 title.

"That's the kind of man he was looking out for his players."@Dempster46 shares this story from 2006 playing for Dusty Baker on the Cubs 🗣️ pic.twitter.com/6ZWBlwM7TY

— MLB Network (@MLBNetwork) October 25, 2023

Baker’s big-league career began in 1968, and except for a few years here and there, he’s been in a uniform ever since.

He went 2,183-1,862 in his 26 years as a manager, making 13 trips to the postseason with five teams. He won his first pennant in 2002 with the San Francisco Giants, losing to the Anaheim Angels in the World Series in Game 7, and his last two 20 years later.

His playing career began with a six-game cameo for the Atlanta Braves as a 19-year-old in 1968. It ended in 1986 with the Oakland Athletics. Baker was famously in the on-deck circle when Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s home run record on April 8, 1974, and he won a ring with the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1981. The year before, he finished fourth in NL MVP voting.

Baker’s big-league career provided enough stories to fill a biography, but his managing record should be enough to get him into the Baseball Hall of Fame. He is seventh in all-time wins, just 11 behind Sparky Anderson.

But in Chicago, well, it’s more complicated.

For many Cubs fans, Baker went from hero to, well, GOAT, at Wrigley Field, maligned for the way the team collapsed in the 2003 NLCS, for how it imploded in 2004 and for the injury-riddled downturn for Mark Prior and Kerry Wood.

Baker carries those wounds still. He hates that people think he didn’t care about his pitchers’ health. It bothers him how some people insulted him when he was down. Was it race? Was it his personality? Was it both?

When I came by the visiting manager’s office on the South Side to talk to Baker for my 2003 Cubs project, his mind darted from topic to topic, leading back to the way things ended in 2006, his last year under contract with the team.

“Man, that was probably the most painful, hurtful time,” he said. “Walking by signs that said, ‘Fire Dusty,’ and my wife would no longer bring my little son, who was 6 at the time, to games because he wanted to fight everybody.”

The other people I talked to for the story were happy to discuss the 2003 season, having (mostly) gotten over how it ended. Not Baker.

“I try to forget it, really,” he said.

But Baker is not so polarizing when you talk to the players from that season. They adore him.

“Dusty was just a psychologist,” said Glanville, who appeared in only 28 regular-season games. “I always call him the godfather of baseball. He’s just a guy that understood people, cared about people, knew them, took the time to learn who they were and motivate them.”

GO DEEPER

Greenberg: The 2003 Cubs bring back memories and a lot of stories

Fans might pin Prior’s injury issues and drastically curtailed career on Baker for riding him too hard that season and in the playoffs, but you’ll never hear that from Prior’s mouth.

“Honestly, he’s one of the reasons I’m coaching,” Prior told me this year.

Thanks to myriad shoulder and arm issues, Prior’s last big-league appearance was in 2006, but he kept trying to return to the majors with different clubs. In 2013, he pitched in Triple A for Baker’s Cincinnati Reds but was released in late June. A month later, the Reds were in San Diego and he had lunch with Baker, who asked whether Prior was thinking about getting into coaching.

“He said, ‘Don’t waste a lot of time, just get back into it,’ because players get older and you get older and you start getting disconnected,” Prior said.

Not long after, the San Diego Padres called and offered him a front-office job. Now, he’s the pitching coach for the Dodgers.

“If I didn’t have that lunch, maybe I wouldn’t have been as quick to get back into the game,” Prior said.

When Baker won the World Series in 2022, Prior was probably one of the few Dodgers rooting for the Astros.

“Like most people,” he said, “I was very happy for Dusty.”

Even before his reinvention as a coach, Prior credits Baker for helping him settle in as a second-year player in 2003. Though Prior, a highly touted young pitcher, wound up putting together a Cy Young-caliber season in 2003, he was nervous and unsure of himself.

“I think the positivity that Dusty brought and really trying to boil it down and focus more on the smaller pictures of winning today, winning months, versus the 162,” he said. “I think I understand that even more now as a coach, of the ups and downs, and kind of how the season ebbs and flows with injuries, you know, with schedules, and when you can get on runs and when you got to just have (a) hold-serve type of mentality.”

Baker was a hot free-agent manager after taking the Giants to the World Series in 2002. He had the experience and the proven results. He was attracted to the Cubs because they had young starting pitching in Prior, Wood and Carlos Zambrano. It didn’t hurt that they offered him a sizable four-year contract and a chance to make history.

“He just brought that indescribable missing ingredient to the recipe of what the Cubs were trying to do,” former Cubs TV broadcaster Chip Caray said.

“He and I had a really good relationship, and I was very grateful because as a first-year GM, you sign Dusty Baker and you go from fifth to first and then basically anything can happen,” former Cubs GM Jim Hendry said.

At his introductory news conference, Baker tried to settle everyone down by saying, “My name is Dusty, not Messiah.”

But if you listen to his former supplicants rave about him, you’re not so sure.

“In Dusty we believe, or whatever the signs used to say — Dusty we trusty,” Wood said. “We bought in early at spring training. He came in and challenged a group of guys.”

“I kind of knew what I was about to experience, but I didn’t really fully grasp it until having that season playing for him,” said Eric Karros, a lifelong Dodger before agreeing to a trade before the 2003 season. “I played for Tommy Lasorda, and he was about as good a player’s manager as you’ll find, a Hall of Famer, and Dusty was from the same cloth. Dusty, if he tells you to go jump off a cliff, you just go jump. You don’t ask why.”

Eric Karros is congratulated by manager Dusty Baker and teammates after scoring a run in Game 1 of the NLDS between the Cubs and Braves in 2003. (Jamie Squire / Getty Images)

“Dusty kind of brings that energy in and of itself … to the ballpark every day,” said pitcher Shawn Estes, who pitched for Baker in San Francisco and during that first season in Chicago.

“He was able to handle everybody, from Sammy (Sosa) from all the way down to our bench guys,” reliever Kyle Farnsworth said. “He knew where to put guys in and what situations to come get guys. He had a great niche doing that kind of stuff. Also, not sugarcoating stuff either and being able to smack a guy around and put him in place while telling him good job as well.”

Glanville remembers seeing Baker at a bar in Puerto Rico when the Cubs were there to play the Montreal Expos. Usually, when a player sees a manager out on the town, he goes somewhere else. But Baker, who was grooving on the dance floor, wouldn’t let Glanville leave. Baker wanted to get to know his players as people. That led them to trust him even more.

It also made them more susceptible to his messages. Before the 2003 NLDS in Atlanta, Baker came in to talk to the team after his news conference.

Glanville remembers that Baker told the assembled Cubs that he had praised Atlanta, which had the best record in baseball in the regular season, to the media and explained that the Cubs were just hoping to play well enough to have a shot. He went on and on.

“And then, he pauses,” Glanville said, “and he’s like, ‘Forget what I just said. I don’t believe any of that. We’re going to destroy these guys in their own house, and we’re gonna take it to them. We’re the better team.’ I mean, he completely 180’d off of it. It was hilarious. We laughed because it was Dusty.”

Estes, who had pitched for Baker from 1995 through 2001 in San Francisco, has one of the better stories about Baker from that season. After a rough start against the Milwaukee Brewers on July 30, Estes and his then-wife were walking back to their Lincoln Park home when he heard someone call his name from a dark side street. It was Baker sitting in his parked car.

“I went over there, and he’s like, ‘I can’t believe I just saw you because I’m here thinking about you right now,’” Estes said.

Baker told him how Hendry and team president Andy MacPhail had approached him about releasing Estes, who had a 5.95 ERA, after the veteran’s start. Baker asked them to wait. And so there he was thinking about the situation when he saw Estes walking down the street.

“He’s like, ‘This has to be a sign — the fact that I just saw you,’” Estes said.

Estes started again and had another bad outing. After leaving the team for the birth of his son, Estes was demoted to the bullpen. That didn’t go great, either. But Baker, ever faithful, gave Estes one more start — with the division on the line. All Estes did was pitch a complete-game shutout in Cincinnati on Sept. 24.

“I know the fans were really upset about that decision,” he said. “And I’m sure Dusty caught a lot of flak for it. And he really had to take a leap of faith, really, to throw me out there in a big situation like that.”

JUST IN: Dusty Baker has expressed to multiple inside & outside the Astros organization that 2023 will be his final season as manager, sources tell The Athletic.

◻️ 2x World Series Champion
◻️ 3x Manager of the Year
◻️ 19 years as a player
◻️ 26 years as a manager

Details ⤵️

— The Athletic (@TheAthletic) October 24, 2023

It’s human moments like that his players remember 20 years later. More than the wins and losses, more than his toothpicks and wristbands, more than how the season unraveled in two dark nights at Wrigley Field.

“I think some of the baseball lessons transcended to me as life lessons,” catcher Paul Bako said. “You know you can’t out-positive cancer or you can’t out-positive bad events that are going to happen. But you can try to control your mind the best you can, and being optimistic and thinking positively goes a long way into a happier and healthier life. I’ve had really good conversations with friends and family about this. I think some of my mindset initiated from just being around him and watching him lead.”

Baker didn’t get to win it all in Chicago like he had hoped, etching his name into history. Life doesn’t always work out for the best.

If you’re a Cubs fan who still dislikes Baker or blames him for Prior’s and Wood’s careers, that’s fine. It’s your opinion.

But the Cubs who played for Baker will never forget their time playing for him. And that’s a legacy he can proud of.

(Top photo of Dusty Baker waving to fans during a spring training workout in 2003: Jeff Gross / Getty Images)

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