When Dusty Baker flew to George Bush Intercontinental Airport last week to meet with executives of the Houston Astros, two reporters greeted him at baggage claim. They asked Baker if it would be tough to take on the job he sought: manager of a team disgraced by a sign-stealing scandal.
“Yeah,” Baker said, with no equivocation. “I’m not going to say it’s not.”
Half of the current major league managers had not even been born when Baker started his major league playing career in 1968. He is 70 years old now, with a perspective sharpened by his deep well of life experience. Managing a baseball team, he said, is far easier than some jobs.
“If you want to feel some pressure, you just be a world leader,” added Baker, who served in the United States Marine Corps Reserves in the Vietnam era. “I’m just hoping to bring some love back to baseball, some integrity to the game, and I think I’ve got relative respect in the game.”
Baker is the right man at the right time with the right message for the Astros, and now that is official: The team announced on Wednesday that it had hired Baker to be its new manager.
The Astros will talk a lot about moving on from the cheating scheme that forever taints their 2017 World Series title. But to really get past it, they need a frontman who will level with the rest of the sport. Baker, who has never worked for the Astros, will not minimize the issue or pretend that the cheating made no impact. By speaking openly about the need to restore integrity, he has already shown that he gets it.
To review: Major League Baseball confirmed this month that the Astros’ players devised a scheme to steal opposing catchers’ signs off a monitor, and, in real time, relay the type of pitch to the hitter by, among other methods, banging on a trash can. Commissioner Rob Manfred suspended General Manager Jeff Luhnow and Manager A.J. Hinch for one year, and then the franchise owner, Jim Crane, fired them.
Alex Cora, who helped orchestrate the sign-stealing as the Houston bench coach in 2017, was soon let go from his job as manager of the Boston Red Sox. The Mets then parted ways with Carlos Beltran, their new manager, because he had been instrumental in the operation as an Astros player.
Those decisions highlight the outrage around the league over the Astros’ infractions. Four extremely bright, talented leaders lost their jobs because the scandal so severely undercut their credibility. They all have more to offer, but only if they pave their way back with sincere contrition.
So far, the Astros’ hitters, who were spared punishment from M.L.B., have shown little to no remorse for what happened. At the team’s FanFest on Jan. 18 — five days after Manfred issued his report — the All-Stars Alex Bregman and Jose Altuve offered no insights or apologies.
“The commissioner came out with a report, M.L.B. did their report, and the Astros did what they did,” Bregman said. “They made their decision what they’re going to do, and I have no other thoughts on it.”
Altuve was a bit more expansive, saying he felt bad for Luhnow and Hinch but stopping short of saying much else, other than the usual bromides about sticking together as a team.
Dallas Keuchel, a starter for the 2017 Astros who now pitches for the Chicago White Sox, demonstrated a better way to handle this. Asked about the scandal at a White Sox fan event last week, Keuchel said: “Was it against the rules? Yes, it was. I personally am sorry for what’s come about, the whole situation.”
Such a blanket apology should not be hard to convey. Keuchel’s new teammates deserve that much; Manfred’s report said the White Sox had caught on to the trash-can signals during a 2017 game, causing “a sense of ‘panic’ in the Astros’ dugout” and forcing the players to remove the monitor from its place in their dugout tunnel and stash it in an office.
That episode shows that the Astros understood they were cheating, and deep down they must know that they have earned their fate as a laughingstock. Opponents openly mock them on social media now, and you wonder if pitchers will soon express their disgust with beanballs. Out-of-context teasing is also fair game: Gritty, the Philadelphia Flyers’ mascot, lampooned the Astros at a recent game by whacking a trash can with their logo on it.
The Astros needed an outsider to change the story, and Baker has spent a lifetime bringing people together. He is a magnetic personality who commands respect, gives respect and produces wins. All four of the teams he has managed — the San Francisco Giants, the Chicago Cubs, the Cincinnati Reds and the Washington Nationals — won their divisions during his tenure, and only eight managers have won more games with a better winning percentage.
“He has an ability to relate to each and every one of these guys, where they’re from, what they’ve been through, their parents’ situation, their likes and dislikes. He’s a pretty eclectic guy in regards to everything,” Chris Speier, a longtime coach under Baker, said in the Nationals’ clubhouse a few years ago.
“He understands it, because he’s lived every one of those scenarios in his own life. He’s walked a lot of the roads the players have walked before, so I think from that standpoint there’s an immediate almost kinship that he develops with his guys. There’s a trust. He’s that uncle they can talk to, that they feel comfortable with.”
The Astros have the talent to get Baker the championship he has never won as a manager, the one accomplishment he needs to validate his case for the Hall of Fame. Whether or not they acknowledge it, the Astros need validation, too.
Ten players remain from the Astros’ 2017 team. Few people outside Houston regard them as legitimate champions anymore, but the players avoided discipline from Manfred. Soon they will get another chance to prove themselves, with a leader wise enough to emphasize the missing component in their success: integrity.