DUSTY’S TRAILS

Late in the evening, Johnnie B. Baker Jr., quite possibly the best manager in baseball, makes himself at home inside the visitors’ clubhouse of Dodger Stadium, where he is no mere visitor. Twenty years ago, he made this park rock. When he homered on his last at-bat in the last game on the 1977 Dodger schedule, a leaf in Chavez Ravine’s scrapbook of memories became Dusty Baker’s for life.

He should have been a Dodger forever. Not everyone, however, is cut out to be, including the owner.

“Did it catch you by surprise,” I ask, “the day Peter O’Malley put the Dodgers up for sale?”

“Caught the world by surprise,” Baker says.

“Ever think he’d sell?”

“Nah. You always expected Mr. O’Malley would pass it on to his sons, who’d pass it on to their sons, and so forth.”

Out of curiosity, I ask, “Ever see O’Malley any more?”

The question gets a chuckle out of Baker.

He says, “See him? We hardly saw him when we were here.”

Every old castle needs a ghost.

“I guess it’s the end of an era,” I say.

“Well, look at it this way,” the manager of the San Francisco Giants suggests. “It’s the start of a new one.”

*

Men do move on.

On April 11, 1977, when the lineup card was hand-delivered by Tommy Lasorda to the plate umpire--Lopes, Russell, Smith, Cey, Garvey, Monday, Baker, Yeager, Sutton--it marked the first time Dusty Baker’s name appeared in the Dodgers’ opening-day order. It was a very good day in L.A. Dusty and the Dodgers defeated those evil-doers, the San Francisco Giants.

It was a fresh start. Baker had contributed a measly four home runs to the Dodgers the previous season, in 112 games. He had cost the club Jimmy Wynn, Lee Lacy, Tom Paciorek and Jerry Royster, in a big trade with Atlanta on Nov. 17, 1975, that brought the Dodgers nothing but Baker and a light-hitting infielder named Ed Goodson in return. Baker’s batting average was .242 for the Dodgers during that season of ’76. America was having a bicentennial, but not everybody had reason to celebrate.

Dusty was a bust.

Lasorda, who was named to replace Walter Alston at the end of the 1976 season, looked back on it this way: “We’d gotten Dusty Baker from the Braves in 1976 to provide the power we’d desperately needed, and he hit a very disappointing four home runs for us. A lot of people were saying the trade had been a mistake, and that we needed an outfielder to take his place.

“ ‘You haven’t heard that from me, though,’ I told Dusty, ‘and you won’t, because you’re gonna be my left fielder from the first day of spring training to the final game of the World Series.’ I told reporters that Dusty had been a great player and we weren’t guessing when we traded for him.”

Decisions are made by managers every day. Many blow up in their faces.

Some do not.

Johnnie B. Baker Jr., “Dusty” to the world at large, “Bake” to his friends, played in 1,092 games as a Dodger, more than any outfielder except Willie Davis in the club’s 40-year L.A. history. When fans voted for their all-time Dodger team during a 100th anniversary celebration in 1990, their left fielder was Dusty Baker.

Not even summer was hotter than Dusty, those last couple months of 1977 in the ravine. On Sept. 12, he hit a grand slam off a San Diego pitcher named Dave Freisleben. The next day, Baker had five RBIs . . . in one inning, still a Dodger record.

He poked another grand slam Oct. 5, this one off Jim Lonborg of the Philadelphia Phillies in the playoffs, and enjoyed it so much, he grand-slammed Lonborg again, early the following season.

Vin Scully, the Dodger broadcaster, more vividly recalls another Dusty homer.

“That last at-bat of 1977,” Scully says, “practically brought the house down.”

Never had four players from one team reached the 30-homer mark in a season. Not the old New York Yankees of the Ruth and Gehrig days, not the newer New York Yankees of the Mantle and Maris days. (This was long before the Colorado Rockies got 30 homers out of everybody but their pitcher.)

Ron Cey had his 30. Steve Garvey had his 30. Reggie Smith had his 30.

Baker had one more turn at bat, and 29 home runs in the books. The pitcher for the Houston Astros was the formidable J.R. Richard, who was as menacing in his day as Randy Johnson is today.

Lasorda: “Every player on our bench was on the top step, screaming for Dusty. And when he hit the home run to set the record, the dugout exploded. It was as if we had won the pennant.”

That sweet season of 1977 wouldn’t end there. It continued with Baker batting .292 against the New York Yankees in the World Series, which included yet another home run.

He couldn’t have known then that the managerial choices Lasorda made would be precursors to choices Baker would make 20 years later himself, or that the team he would manage would be, well . . . that one up north. Waived by the Dodgers before the 1984 season, Dusty is of mixed blood now, half-Dodger, half-Giant. It is an odd hybrid. It is like being part-Republican, part-Democrat, even though everybody’s got to start somewhere.

Back a season or two, when Lasorda was still in uniform, nobody could needle the Dodgers any better from an opposite dugout than Dusty Baker could. He could play this game as well as he played the game.

But upon mentioning Lasorda’s upcoming induction in baseball’s Hall of Fame, abruptly there is no Dodger-Giant rivalry, none whatever.

“He’s an outstanding manager,” Dusty says, in the present tense, which Tommy will appreciate.

“When I started out, he told me, ‘Don’t be afraid. If you feel a kid can play, stick your neck out and play him.’ That’s what he did for me.

“I think people forget that he had equal talent as a manager and as an evaluator of players. It seems managers don’t have a chance to do that any more.”

No, those old days are gone.

Yet now and then, a modern manager has to remind a player of the way things were. Consider what happened a couple seasons ago, when Tony Phillips reached the end of his rope one day in spring training with the Chicago White Sox, announced without warning his retirement and left camp. Phillips tried to explain his behavior to Dusty Baker a few days later, saying he wasn’t receiving the respect he deserved, looking for a sympathetic ear.

Baker scolded him, on the spot.

He said, according to Phillips, something on the order of, “Respect? Baseball isn’t supposed to respect you. You’re supposed to respect baseball.”

Phillips un-retired, practically overnight.

A little communication goes a long way. Baker seems to be an excellent communicator. He even is fluent in conversational Spanish, same as Lasorda. Says Giant second baseman Jeff Kent, now in his first season of playing for Baker, “He understands the game from a player’s standpoint. He knows you can’t get over-anxious during the good times and you can’t panic during the bad. Dusty knows the game. He’s been there.”

Being there for your players is what makes a man a manager.

On the day San Francisco clinched the pennant in 1989, everybody got carried away, including pitcher Dave Dravecky, who had a cancerous tumor removed from his arm, then broke it while attempting a comeback. Dravecky didn’t want to be left out of the celebration. He ran onto the diamond with his teammates, simply to hang on the fringe. But someone accidentally pushed Dravecky onto the pile, where his arm broke again.

While the rest of the Giants celebrated, two people carried Dravecky off the field. One was the trainer, Mark Letendre, and the other was the batting coach, Dusty Baker.

*

Too bad the Dodgers never had means or opportunity--or enough foresight--to make Baker their manager one day.

Whatever fallout there was from a Dodger executive’s regrettable remarks, about which individuals lacked the “necessities” to manage in the majors, the compensation is that a Baker and a Don Baylor end up managing the very division rivals striving to beat L.A. to the playoffs.

On the day Baker was named to manage the Giants, he unwound that night at the home of some friends. A sportswriter, Susan Fornoff, who was there wrote of Baker, “He sat there on the couch, still wired and energetic, talking--somewhat hoarsely by now--about the changes he wanted to make and the philosophies he would bring to his new job.

“He will clearly be a different, open-minded kind of manager, one who, he said that night, would be growing his hair into Rastafarian locks if he weren’t trying to rise through the conservative white ranks of baseball.”

In 1993, Baker’s first season as a manager, the Giants won 103 games. They lost 59.

Already he ranks among the deans of National League managers. After today’s game with the Dodgers plus one more, Baker will be tied with Charlie Fox for the second-most games by a San Francisco manager. Roger Craig is the only one with more.

He has done a lot in a little time.

And he is in first place, with the Dodgers trying to catch him.

“Oh,” Dusty says, “let’s not worry about that until they do.”

The Dodgers are they, but that can’t be helped. Sometimes, a manager can’t be afraid to stick his neck out.