On the morning before his big triumph, Johnny B. Baker junior drove to the dry cleaners. Why not? He had some dirty clothes lying around and a little distraction couldn’t hurt before this game. So Baker, whom everyone just calls “Dusty,” got in his car, put on “You Ain’t Nothing But a Hound Dog” by Big Mama Thornton, got a coffee, and drove to the laundry. That evening, at the age of 73, he won his first baseball finals series as a coach.
His Houston Astros, who he has been in charge of since 2020, won 4-1, mainly because of Yordan Alvarez’s three-run home run in the sixth period of the game – a 150-meter hammer that looked like the ball would fly to the moon. The Astros won the World Series against the Philadelphia Phillies 4-2, and if you want to know what that means for Baker right now, you have to look to his son Darren for the moment of triumph. He laughed and cried at the same time in the stands.
Darren has been famous since running onto the field to get a bat during the 2002 World Series as a mini-staff for the San Francisco Giants. He was only three years old then. In baseball, it’s always done by kids, the so-called bat boy Only: The game was still going on, and Darren would have been run over by an adult professional athlete in a full sprint if Giants player JT Snow hadn’t intervened courageously. But after that, the Giants never won a game, they lost that series. The minimum age for Bat Boys was then raised to 14 years.
Dusty Baker became one of MLB’s first black head coaches in 1993
Darren is now 23 years old, a junior pro in the lower echelons of the Washington Nationals, and on Saturday he was in the stadium and saw his father perfect himself.
The word legend is used in an inflationary way in sports these days, but Dusty Baker is actually one: he played in the MLB professional league for 18 years, and in 1981 he won the title with the Los Angeles Dodgers – as a Californian, he’s only an hour’s drive away Born and raised in remote Riverside. During his early professional years in Atlanta, he served as a reservist in the United States Marine Corps.
After the end of his active career in 1987 he tried his hand as a stockbroker. But that was too boring for him, so he worked his way up as an assistant coach with the Giants – and in 1993 became only the seventh black head coach in MLB history. “I feel this pressure precisely because so many people are feverish with me,” he said on Saturday after the success: “I notice it every day, especially from people of color when I meet them on the street. Police officers, construction workers, the bellboy at the hotel. They all wanted me to win and at some point you feel that.” That, Baker suggested, could be both encouraging and burdensome, and the longer it takes to achieve great success, the more of a burden it becomes.
Yes, he won more than many, the 2,093 MLB victories is the most by a black coach – and the most for one who has not won a title. So Baker became someone who knows more about this game than most; and one who knows more about how baseball players deal with their neuroses at times. But he also became one who had not won a title in 25 years as a coach – in other words, an incomplete man, of which there are many in sport.
“Oh, looking back, I’m glad it took so long,” Baker joked on Saturday. “Otherwise I would have retired long ago.” As it was, he continued to add artifacts to the sport’s Hall of Fame—after the Dodgers title season jersey and the signed baseball from the 2003 All-Star Game, an Astros cap was added in 2021 after becoming the first coach in history to to lead five clubs (in addition to the Giants and Astros, the Chicago Cubs, Cincinnati Reds and Washington Nationals) to the playoffs.
The Astros were the best team this season, period.
The Astros’ triumph was also rehabilitation and cementing. Rehabilitation because they had proven to have won the 2017 title through unfair means. Baker wasn’t a coach there then. The Astros had spied on the opponents and transmitted their tactics live to their own players by knocking. The title this year has come about quite legitimately, and after the lost final series in 2019 and 2021, finally the proof: You have a really good team there, and winning the championship – the Astros were the best team this season, period – cemented this era, which has so far been given an asterisk by the scandal.
It is ironic that Baker too thought that he would have to live with this little star forever as an unfinished one. After separating from the Nationals in 2017, he was without a job for three years, and his career seemed over. But then the Astros had to fire their coach, AJ Hinge, because of the scandal. It had to be done quickly, they wanted a short-term solution; so they gave the then 70-year-old Baker a one-year contract. They extended it and now they won the title.
As already mentioned, a few of Baker’s memorabilia have been collected in the Baseball Hall of Fame. As late as Sunday evening, those responsible announced that they were looking for pretty much everything that had to do with Baker – it would now be neatly displayed. Baker said he had a few things and it was a good thing he rushed to the laundry on the morning of the win. It’s all pretty clean now.