King Kaufman's Sports Daily
Cubs in free fall: How did Dusty Baker lose his mojo? And is it gone for good?
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June 28, 2006 | Dusty Baker is a fool, a horrible excuse for a manager, a dunce, an idiot, the most overrated field general in the history of the game, and the Chicago Cubs should fire him.
I don't believe all that. I actually don't believe any of it except maybe the last part. But what's funny is that I don't think I could type a sentence that would be less controversial than that one.
It looks to me like everyone wants Baker out. The sabermetric types have been suspicious of him for years because of his poor tactical decisions, abuse of young pitchers' arms and insistence on playing washed-up veterans over prospects, but Cubs fans and Chicago media are starting to beat the drums against Baker as loudly as any stathead ever has.
And why not? The Cubs are 28-48, in fifth place in the National League Central. The only good news is that the Cubs are lucky enough to be in the one division where you can fall farther than fifth, and the one that's also home to the Pittsburgh Pirates, losers of 12 in a row.
The Cubs have lost five in a row and 12 out of 14. They're 14 games out of first place, but worse than that, they're nine games out of fourth. Even if they get better, it isn't going to get a whole lot better.
Dusty Baker spent a decade as one of the most respected managers in the major leagues. Now he's a fool. What happened?
From 1993 to 2002 Baker managed the San Francisco Giants. His first team was one of the best second-place clubs in baseball history, winning 103 games but losing the division race to the Atlanta Braves in the last year before the advent of the wild card.
Then in his last six years in San Francisco the Giants won three division titles and finished second the other three years. They won the pennant in 2002, losing the World Series in seven games to the Anaheim Angels.
Throughout his tenure with the Giants, Baker was lauded as a terrific manager, one of the best in baseball. There were those pointing out even then that he rode pitchers awfully hard, putting them at injury risk, that he had way too much love for useless old veterans along the lines of Shawon Dunston, and that he had no clue about the finer points of baseball tactics.
But it was something of a given that his communication and leadership skills trumped all that, that players simply played better when Dusty Baker was their manager. Those Giants teams he kept guiding to first- and second-place finishes were routinely pegged as also-rans in preseason forecasts.