On Race, Baker Swings With Grace

Six years ago, I wrote an homage to Dusty Baker that hailed his approach to race as a key to his success in leading the middling San Francisco Giants to the National League West title that year, over the Los Angeles Dodgers. Headlined “Dusty’s way,” the article quoted Giant team members praising Baker’s unrivaled ability to take players and coaches from all over the world and turn them into a first-place team by talking about race, not hiding from it.

Now Baker, the Chicago Cubs’ manager, is in danger of becoming the poster boy for “reverse racism,” thanks to a pregame riff with beat writers about whether warm-weather baseball is tougher on whites. “It’s easier for most Latin guys and it’s easier for most minority people because most of us come from heat,” Baker said earlier this month. “You don’t find too many brothers in New Hampshire and Maine and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.... We were brought over here for the heat, right? Isn’t that history? Weren’t we brought over because we could take the heat?”

The reaction to Baker’s comments burned up sports-talk radio phone lines for a day, then the wildfire spread to the studios of right-wing demagogues on cable television and radio. Rush Limbaugh called Baker a “disciple” of Leonard Jeffries, the notorious City College of New York professor known for crackpot theories about “ice people” and “sun people.” Fox’s Sean Hannity said that because a white manager would have been fired for Baker’s remarks -- a debatable point -- Baker must be punished.

I’ve known Baker professionally for 11 years, and as usual, the right-wing broadcast bully-boys are dead wrong. But the issue may be with us for a while: Baker will attract international attention at Tuesday’s All-Star game as National League manager. So his views on race could be a story for a while -- but let’s get it straight. If Baker’s going to become famous as a race relations symbol, it should be as a role model, not a pariah.

Baker is to the multiracial world of baseball what Bill Clinton was to the splintered, disabled Democratic Party: He does the impossible every day; he makes sure fractious rivals get along; he shows us how it’s supposed to work. One of four African American managers, he speaks fluent Spanish and still hangs out with his white high school “homeboys” from Sacramento. He’s married to a native San Franciscan of Filipino descent. He put together multiracial management teams, first in San Francisco, now in Chicago -- reuniting this year with bench coach Dick Pole, who’s white, and third base coach Wendell Kim, the only Asian field coach in major league baseball, who worked for Baker years ago in San Francisco. He brought with him to Chicago black and Latino coaches from the Giants. “If you can’t find somebody on my staff you can talk to, you’re not trying,” he told me when I asked him in 1997 about his racially diverse management staff.

That conversation was triggered by then-Dodger catcher Mike Piazza’s complaint that his high-payroll, underperforming team was hampered by its diversity -- that the sheer number of languages players spoke, along with their different cultures, led to a crippling communication gap. Some criticized Piazza’s candor, but Baker, a beloved ex-Dodger himself, praised it. “People complained about his saying it, but it was the first step to taking it on as an issue -- to say that guys would have to make a real effort to come together,” Baker observed. “Most people will just hold it in when they feel that way, but he let it out.” And letting it out is a good thing in the world according to Baker.

Sure, Baker’s stream-of-consciousness riff about whites and heat may not be science -- although in fact there’s scientific debate about whether folks of different races experience heat differently. Either way, though, Baker told reporters what he thinks about the topic. And to his credit, he usually says what he thinks. Because it had to do with the often toxic issue of race, some people howled. But Baker’s used to talking about race. The fact is, unlike most of us, he has spent the last 30-plus years in a multiracial workplace, in the kind of setting where people talk and joke and ask questions about things most of the rest of us, in our color-sorted worlds, still think of as taboo.

That’s not to say Baker has no issues about race. He would admit to plenty. In high school, he moved from racially mixed Riverside to the Sacramento suburb of Carmichael, where he and his brother Robert were the only black students at Del Campo High. He was a popular athlete with a lot of friends, but on the night of his graduation, when boys and girls walked across the stage in couples, he couldn’t find a white girl who would walk with him. Later, he was sent to Atlanta Braves farm teams in the South, where the reality of Southern racism made Carmichael seem like a multicultural Valhalla. “We couldn’t live in the white neighborhoods; we had to live in the ghetto, where the pimps and prostitutes were our partners,” he once told me. “You go look at all my early baseball cards -- I’m not smiling in any of them. I was angry.”

He flirted with black nationalism, but he got some advice from his sister, a Christian missionary in Colombia. “My sister told me: Don’t harden your heart.” And he never did. Nobody thinks Baker has a problem with white people, or white players. His best friends in baseball over the years have always included whites, like ex-Giants Matt Williams and Robby Thompson, and current Giant pitching coach Dave Righetti. The player who helped inspire Baker’s recent racial musings was that day’s pitcher, the talented but erratic Shawn Estes, who put most of the gray hairs on the 54-year-old Baker’s head, first with the Giants and now with the Cubs. Baker’s given Estes more chances than white managers in New York or Cincinnati did -- and white fans in every city have berated him for it.

In 10 years of writing about Baker, I never saw him play the so-called race card, even when others thought it was warranted. From our first interview, when he defended ex-Giant manager Roger Craig from charges that he dealt poorly with black players, to our last, when he denied his festering troubles with Giant owner Peter Magowan were racial, he went out of his way to defuse every potentially divisive situation I saw him in.

The conflict with Magowan was particularly ripe for misunderstanding and bitterness: Though Baker won three National League Manager of the Year awards and consistently took mid-payroll teams at least into contention for postseason play, if not into October, Magowan wasn’t happy with him. Maybe most dispiriting, the rap against Baker always had vague racial undertones. Critics said he lacked a good grasp of game strategy, he relied too much on hunches, and his popularity with players was a result of charm, not competence. It was a gumbo of probably unconscious but familiar and noxious stereotypes about blacks: that he wasn’t too smart, that he was given to irrational decision-making, but that he was a helluva guy to hang out with. And the corrosive critique ate at Baker.

The last time I interviewed him, a year ago, he admitted he was struggling with the tension between him and Magowan, and he invoked the experience of growing up part of the only black family in Carmichael as a source of his inner strength. When I asked him if he was trying to say race played a role in his troubles with his boss -- because you can ask Baker things like that -- he quickly denied it. “Don’t put that in your article,” he told me vehemently. Baker was more comfortable blaming their culture clash on class: Magowan’s a scion of the Merrill family, of Merrill Lynch fame, and he was Safeway CEO before he took over the Giants; Baker’s a working-class guy from Riverside.

“There’s not always a whole lot of trust,” he admitted. “I’ve always been for the people.” The only questionable aspect about Baker’s racial riff this month is that, even though he thinks of himself as one of the people, he isn’t anymore: He’s the boss. That’s why he has to think twice about whether his words leave the impression he’s stereotyping any one group. He’s never played racial favorites, ever, but someday his musings about white men and heat might inflame a struggling white player he’s benched. I wish he’d been a little bit less defensive when reporters called him on his comments, and elaborated a little more about the way he thinks about these issues and what’s in his heart. But that’s Dusty Baker -- nobody’s going to tell him how to talk about race. Especially not Rush Limbaugh.

It’s possible that Baker’s going to be a race-relations trailblazer once again: Maybe from here on in, we can agree that anyone who says something potentially offensive about race gets a pass as long as the person, like Baker, has a history of cross-racial mixing and inclusion. The angry white men of the right, the purveyors of faux grievance and mock outrage, probably won’t be satisfied with that. They’re going to keep braying about this for a while. But the charges against Baker won’t stick. He’s got a lot of white admirers, all over the country, and we’ve got his back.