Force Plays

Who knows, says Mike Scioscia, when and where a managerial opportunity is going to arise?

There is no “God-given ordainment” that it will happen with this team or that team, Scioscia says, because “that’s not the way the system works, and it shouldn’t.”

The way the system works, Mike Scioscia is in the World Series as manager of the Angels and Dusty Baker is in it as manager of the San Francisco Giants. They were once more than teammates with the Dodgers, and if Baker was the undisputed clubhouse leader on those Dodger teams of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s and a mentor to the young Scioscia, it is not a stretch to think that Baker might have ended up on the same track to manage the Dodgers as Scioscia would seem to have been in the mid- and late ‘90s.

“I know how hard his club has played, how hard Dusty has worked, and I know what we’ve done on our side,” Scioscia said. “I think it’s just an incredible accomplishment to get this far, and when you have a guy on the other side who I respect as much as anybody I’ve ever met, it’s going to be fun and going to be a challenge. But I just don’t think there’s any irony there.”

Maybe not. Maybe you can’t guarantee when and where that managerial opportunity is going to evolve.

But if it isn’t ironic that it could have happened -- and maybe should have happened for Baker and Scioscia with the Dodgers -- isn’t it ironic that it didn’t because these two men who had been so important in recent Dodger history were forced to leave the organization in two of the most distasteful and disgraceful episodes in that organization’s recent history?

“Both,” Baker says, “forced out.”

Tarred, in Baker’s case, by rumors and innuendos of drug involvement, simply because he had grown close to the troubled Steve Howe and had tried to give Howe the same guidance he’d given Scioscia and the other young players. And because his brother, Victor, was a financial advisor to more than half a dozen Dodgers and management suspected him of being more than that and the Bakers of having too much clubhouse influence.

After eight years with the Dodgers, a period in which he played on five playoff teams and three World Series teams, Baker was granted free agency and signed with the Giants in 1984, after the Dodgers had violated his contract by trying to trade him to the Oakland A’s.

Scioscia left the Dodgers after managing their triple-A farm team in Albuquerque in 1999, his 23 years as catcher, major league bench coach, minor league catching coordinator and manager in the organization, trashed when Kevin Malone came in and uprooted many of those responsible for Dodger continuity, after Malone’s minor league coordinators, Jim Benedict and Rick Sofield, had turned the Albuquerque experience into a nightmare for Scioscia.

The details were chronicled in a recent column -- “It was as if the years of loyalty to the Dodgers meant nothing,” said Mickey Hatcher, Scioscia’s batting coach then and now -- but Scioscia plays it down. He acknowledges there were clashes and differences of opinion with Malone’s people but that the primary reason he jumped off what had been that fast track to the managerial office in L.A. was that he felt he was ready for a major league opportunity and no longer saw it happening with the Dodgers.

“I talked with Kevin Malone that winter and they obviously had a lot they wanted to do and it wasn’t as if I was saying, ‘Hey, I want a major league job or else,’ ” Scioscia said. “It was, ‘What’s the future? Where is the organization going?’ and at that time it was very unclear and I think with the opportunities that I thought were going to be out there that it was best to leave and see what was available. I have no hard feelings. No one is guaranteed a job.”

Scioscia found what he was looking for with the Angels, and the Angels found what they had long been looking for in Scioscia.

No one understands the issue of guarantees better than Baker.

He is a man who has beaten prostate cancer, a three-time manager of the year with an expiring contract and there is no certainty he will be retained, or that he wants to be retained amid what is portrayed as a deteriorating relationship with Peter Magowan, the Giants’ managing general partner.

If his valuable performance with the Dodgers can be buried by mysterious drug rumors, who is to say his popularity in the Bay Area will lead to a new contract there?

Does his departure from the Dodgers still weigh on him?

“Sometimes,” Baker said, “but it doesn’t bother me to the point where I should have to relive it again, because those were very tough times for me and my family and the real end of my career because I never played regularly again, even though I knew I could still play, still hit, still earn a lot of money.”

In many ways, Baker said, it “almost broke me as a man, broke my spirit,” but it “can either eat you up or you can get on with your life and it also made me stronger and a better person.” It became part of “my formulation as a person and manager,” and “not one to take a whole bunch of stuff if I don’t feel it’s right and I don’t feel I should take it, like my team’s slogan: ‘We don’t start nothing, but we don’t take nothing either.’

“I mean, people don’t understand what’s inside and what’s caused this to be inside, and I get perturbed when they talk about my sensitivity to criticism and all that stuff because they don’t know what I went through my first year in L.A. [when he struggled after being traded by the Atlanta Braves] and what I went through at the end there and having people drop all that innuendo on me after I had left a whole lot of bones, ligaments and tendons out on the field.

“There were a bunch of times I didn’t have to play, but I played for us, for the team, and then I hit .260 and suddenly I’m on drugs. I mean, dude, people don’t know, don’t think about that, when they talk about my sensitivity and all that.”

Scioscia doesn’t have to be told who Baker is, what he is.

It was as if one leader was passing the baton to the other when the young catcher came up to stay in 1981.

“Dusty was definitely the leader on that club, the common denominator, and whether it was in the clubhouse or in the back of the plane, there were so many times he dragged me out of a card game and said, ‘Hey, we’re going to talk, go over hitters, let’s go,’ ” Scioscia said.

“His favorite line was, ‘Hey, you’re messin’ with my World Series share,’ and his point was that it’s going to take contributions from everybody to get the team where it needed to be, and, as a young catcher on a championship-caliber club, I had a unique responsibility. He wanted to make sure that part of it was as good as it could be, and that was not only important to the success of our club but to the esteem of a young player, and it came from his genuine caring for people. He wanted to be sure that if I got the opportunity to play, I made the most of it because he wanted me to succeed.”

For Baker, it was nothing more than what Henry Aaron and so many others had done for him and an “important thing on a team. I mean, it’s important that you don’t simply possess the knowledge you acquire, because you don’t possess it, you give it to someone else, you pass it along. Scioscia and I were locker mates and I remember so many afternoons in Vero Beach when he would sit at the feet of guys like Roy Campanella and John Roseboro and listen to them talk about catching.”

Now, the Giants and Angels are prepared to play the first wild-card World Series and there should be no asterisk appended because they have laid waste to the rest of the deck, each having eliminated two division winners and basically roared down the stretch in August and September.

Now too, as the Angels turn their back on years of futility and Baker puts to rest his previous playoff frustrations, he gets to experience an October reunion with “homies” from the Riverside neighborhood where he grew up before moving to Sacramento, with Angel coaches Alfredo Griffin, Bud Black, Ron Roenicke and Hatcher, who crossed paths with him in important ways at other times in his career, even with General Manager Bill Stoneman, the only pitcher to have struck him out four times in a game.

“I’m proud of Scioscia and the Angels,” Baker said. “I knew it wasn’t going to take them long to be good, and you realized how good they were when the A’s won those 20 straight games and the Angels were only two or three behind. In any other circumstances, at any other time of the year or division, if they hadn’t been playing as good as they were, they might have been 15 or 16 back.”

Baker was talking via phone, and laughed.

“You’ve got to watch out for Scioscia,” he said. “He’s not scared and he’s smart about it. I dug Mike from Day 1. He had a toughness and intelligence you don’t often see in a young player. You know he has the Angels’ attention because they’re playing situational baseball, good fundamental baseball the way he knows how to play, the way we were taught to play in L.A.”

The way Baker had taught Scioscia before Dodger blue took on a new meaning for the mentor and, much later, for his apprentice.