 |
 |
 |
|
Reds: Five things to know
SARASOTA, Fla. -- Dusty Baker is cramming. No all-nighters. No No-Doz. Not even a final exam coming (not yet, anyway).
But this, most definitely, is cramming.
|
|
| Dusty Baker is spending his spring watching from above and learning about his players. (AP) |
There's Dusty, walking briskly toward Tony Perez Field to watch Bronson Arroyo throw live batting practice. And moving on over to Johnny Bench Field to check out Ken Griffey Jr. and other veterans hitting.
And there's Dusty in the clubhouse, asking players with whom he's trying to familiarize himself for one small favor.
"He's got his hands full right now," veteran Ryan Freel says. "He asked us not to wear jackets onto the practice field so he can see our names on the back of our jerseys.
"That's what he's trying to accomplish here: Relationships. And that's where it starts."
Dusty Baker, man in motion, is in a place he never thought he'd be starting a chapter of his career he never dreamed would need to be written.
Following three NL Manager of the Year awards, after coming within six outs of winning the 2002 World Series in San Francisco, then falling five heartbreaking outs short in '03 of steering the Chicago Cubs to their first Series berth since 1945, Baker and the Reds find themselves on parallel paths together in image rehabilitation.
This is a club whose glory days were so long ago that all you can hear are echoes of the echoes.
This is a manager who finally was pulled under for good by the Cubs in 2006, a 66-96 record earning his first career firing in what had become a poison atmosphere on Chicago's North Side.
"You've got to get over it," Baker said during a conversation in his office following a morning workout the other day. "No matter what they say or do, it doesn't matter. I've cleansed my heart. I take full responsibility for whatever happened there.
"The thing that sort of shocks you is, after you leave, the amount of money that was spent.
"You wonder if it wasn't all that bad, then why do you gotta spend all of that money to improve it? Why do you gotta make all of those changes?"
Indeed, after that 96-loss season, the Cubs jacked up their payroll by some $5 million, from $94.4 million to $99.6 million, adding among others slugger Alfonso Soriano and starting pitchers Ted Lilly and Jason Marquis.
"You've gotta blame somebody, you know?" Baker continued.
This is as expansive as Baker, 58, will get when it comes to defending himself against the toxicity that took him down in Chicago.
"I tried to forget it as soon as I could," Baker said. "Why should that experience spoil your joy in life and control your self-esteem?
"Life's good. There's a lot of positive stuff that came out of Chicago that I'm taking forward with me. You get tougher. You get more focused. I had one job a long time and then I left (San Francisco), and then I had a job for a few years and I was fired.
"So I'm one and one, know what I mean?"
He spent his one year between managing gigs working baseball for ESPN and doing some of those cool things he had always wanted to do but never had the time.
He traveled to Africa on a baseball goodwill tour with Mets general manager Omar Minaya, Hall of Famer Dave Winfield and former major leaguers Bob Watson and Reggie Smith. Took his son turkey hunting. Spent time with his parents. Finished building -- and moving into -- his new house in Sacramento.
"I needed the time off," he said. "I wouldn't have chosen the time myself. You would never say, 'I need a year off.'
"But it was a very good year. You felt like you cleansed your mind. And anytime you get fired it hurts, so you've gotta clean out your heart, too."
He and a couple of buddies fished in Montana and again in Quebec. He positively glows when talking about attending the NCAA Tournament games in Sacramento last spring with his wife Melissa and nine-year-old son Darren.
"That was awesome," Baker said. "Awesome. I saw Indiana and Kansas. Saw UCLA. Saw some quality basketball, two games a day.
"That was so much fun."
Yes, the time away from the dugout to decompress was terrific.
The anxiety about whether he would get another chance to manage wasn't.
He sought the counsel of longtime friends like Al Attles, the former NBA coach, Hall of Famer Joe Morgan and former manager Cito Gaston. He thought long and hard about how Gaston led Toronto to World Series titles in 1992 and 1993 ... and then, after the Jays fired him in 1997, never could get another managing job.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
"It makes you wonder what will happen to you," he said. "Don Baylor couldn't get another job. Cito. Hal McRae, Davey Lopes.
"I knew how I felt. I knew I felt like I should have gotten another opportunity. But when and where ..."
Those were the questions, and they were no small questions. He did speak with a couple of clubs during his year away, even going so far as to telephone the Padres after Bruce Bochy left for San Francisco. He flew down to San Diego and interviewed with Padres president Sandy Alderson and general manager Kevin Towers.
"But they had their mind set on Buddy (Black)," Baker said. "No problem."
What he did notice as seven managerial jobs opened and then were filled during his time away was that they were going to younger men who did not command large salaries (the Padres, for example, chopped their managerial pay roughly in half in going from Bochy, with a $1 million annual salary, to Black, who is making about $550,000).
Gaston and Morgan both advised against staying out of the game too long. And though Baker's preference would have been to take over a team with more firepower -- the Reds finished fifth in the NL Central at 72-90 last summer -- their words along with memories of something from his own playing career in 1983 made him jump when the Reds came calling.
See, he was with the Dodgers in '83 when they tried to trade him to Oakland. Baker used the no-trade clause in his contract to block it, then signed with San Francisco in 1984. Now 35 and without a no-trade clause, Baker helplessly watched the Giants trade him to ... yep, Oakland, for the '85 season.
"I learned years ago, go where you're wanted," Baker said of the lesson. "They showed me they wanted me."
The Reds showed it with the three-year offer for roughly $10.5 million they extended, keeping him among the game's highest-paid managers despite the ugly ending with the Cubs.
And they showed it in discussing their vision with him, part of which was implemented in signing closer Francisco Cordero to a four-year, $46 million deal this winter and in general manager Wayne Krivsky's aggressive pursuit of pitching elsewhere. The Reds' staff ERA of 4.94 ranked 15th in the NL last season. Nobody allowed more than the Reds' 796 earned runs.
"It's a big job," Baker says. "But we're not that far away. We've tried to add some quality people, people of character."
It is not a typical Baker club. Historically, he prefers veterans. Recently, the Reds have gone younger and, until Cordero, cheaper.
To that end, Baker retained all but one from last year's coaching staff to help shorten the learning curve. He spent hours on the telephone over the winter checking in with unfamiliar players and getting to know them. He makes the rounds daily in the clubhouse.
"Sometimes he seems too good to be true," Freel says. "You're waiting to hear one bad thing about him. You talk to players on different teams who have played for him and everybody says, 'This guy's legit.'"
One of those is Kent Mercker, the veteran reliever in camp as a non-roster player after sitting out last season following elbow injury. Mercker played for Baker's 2004 Cubs and thinks the Reds finally have a man who can help restore credibility.
"He communicates great on a personal level, and he brings that management-labor gap together," Mercker says, before adding: "Bake, in a team meeting, he'll quote Shakespeare and then, in the next sentence, he'll quote Jay-Z.
"Half the guys understand the first reference, and the other half of the guys understand the other one. You hear that Bobby Knight can't coach anymore because he can't deal with the new athlete. Bake adapts. He's 58 years old, and yet you feel like you just graduated high school together."
That Baker is carrying any baggage -- real or perceived -- from the toxic Cubs ending irritates Mercker.
"I think 99 percent of it wasn't warranted," Mercker says. "The stuff they were saying about Bake ... I read where we had terrible team chemistry. That team was probably tied for first in chemistry with any team I've played for.
"That was probably as close-knit a group as I've seen, from the white guy from deep Texas to the Latin guys."
As for criticism that Baker contributed to blowing out the ever-injured Doomsday Twins, Kerry Wood and Mark Prior, Mercker says, "They were hurt before. Somehow that became Dusty's fault. I haven't seen the pitcher yet who wants to be taken off the mound. He wasn't making anybody pitch."
How Baker handles these Reds will be fascinating -- and telling -- because there are some similarities with his Cubs clubs.
Center fielder Jay Bruce's phenom reputation made the majors before he did ... similar to that of Corey Patterson when he was with the Cubs. Patterson never did take off, and some of those with the Cubs at the time admit he was rushed. Though Bruce has yet to make his Reds debut, he was named minor league player of the year by Baseball America last season and his emergence is part of why Krivsky dealt Josh Hamilton to Texas.
Right-hander Homer Bailey, 21, is a former first-round pick in whom the club has high hopes. He didn't race to the majors as quickly as Prior, but his pedigree is similar.
The fact that so many coaches were here last season -- especially pitching coach Dick Pole, a long-time friend of Baker's who was Dusty's pitching coach in San Francisco from 1993-1997 -- will help with the cramming.
Perhaps the most telling example of how off-course the Reds have been is right here in the manager's chair that Baker now occupies: In the past five seasons, the man who started the season as Reds manager finished it only twice. Freel has played for five different managers in five seasons.
That, simply, is ridiculous.
"You know what's really weird?" Baker says. "My first assignment for ESPN last year, I came down here to Sarasota. I was in the booth with Rick Sutcliffe, they had me go into the truck to see all that. It was the first game for Daisuke (Matsuzaka), and it was against the Reds. I had no clue then that I'd end up here.
"A lot of times in life, you think things are up to you. And they're not."