Here Comes Dusty Baker

Nationals’ players and broadcasters are certainly excited. “I’m looking forward to getting out to Spring Training,” said Max Scherzer, one of the top pitchers in the game, and author of two no-hitters and a couple of near no-hitters this past season. “Welcome to DC skip!” tweeted Bryce Harper, baseball’s best player in 2015. Harper also recently reached out to Jonathon Papelbon to bury the hatchet after their year-end confrontation that sealed the fate of former manager Matt Williams. All in all, the club’s off to a great Hot Stove league start in hiring Mike Maddux as pitching coach, and Baker’s former Dodgers teammate Davey Lopes to coach first.

So, we, too, welcome Baker, congratulate him on his new gig, and wish him all best luck in bringing a World Series title to the capital of the free world. But the thing is, if everything looks so rosy, why do key parts of the local baseball community seem to believe that Baker’s hiring augurs bad things for the Anacostia nine?

No one it appears is worried about Baker’s reputation for overtaxing his pitchers, as he is believed to have done with the Cubs back in the 90s. He learned to manage his staff better in Cincinnati, say analysts, and besides, there are likely other reasons for the injuries that plagued Kerry Wood and Mark Prior. No, the concern is for the Nats organization as a whole, whose problems, say some, are highlighted by Baker’s hiring.

Ok, it’s true the Nats made something of a hash of the hiring process. A week before the club announced that Dusty had the job, news leaked that they were going to name Bud Black, a former big league pitcher who managed the San Diego Padres for eight years until he was fired midway through the 2015 campaign. Reportedly, the sticking point was that Black felt Nationals’ owner Ted Lerner low-balled him, with an initial offer of $1.6 million for one year. Eventually, Lerner offered Black three years at a much higher salary—according to one report, “well above the average major league managing salary, perhaps in the top 10.” But Black, say insiders, was so “deeply offended” by the initial tender that negotiations never got back on track.

The news Black was going to get the job shouldn’t have been leaked until everything was in order. But it’s pretty clear that the Nats dodged a bullet here. Bud Black was “deeply offended”? Excuse me, but is that a former big-league pitcher whining?—because it sounded an awful lot like the Iranian foreign minister. Is Black “deeply offended” when ballplayers spit sunflower seeds in the dugout? What about when a hitter doesn’t get a runner over, pitchers leave an 0-2 pitch out over the plate, or infielders bungle a double play? How does a guy with a .477 winning percentage as manager get to be “deeply offended” when a club that has proven it is serious about winning a World Series opens the bidding with more than a million and a half dollars for a year’s worth of work.

“Managers want money,” writes Thomas Boswell, “but they also desperately need guaranteed years to give them authority in their clubhouse.” Following the logic of the Washington Post’s top baseball scribe, if a manager’s authority is proportional to the number of years his contract guarantees, then he would have most authority with a contract guaranteed for life. To give him ultimate authority, the lifetime contract would obtain regardless of how well he does his job. Sort of like tenure. Maybe Bud Black wanted to be able to pass the post on to his children like some despotic Middle East dictatorship, but Ted Lerner offered him only three years, which “deeply offended” his excellency.

Why are baseball writers effectively defending the professional etiquette of a guy who clearly needs to find out how the rest of the world works, outside of Major League Baseball? Or maybe the Post works like that, too—in which case Jeff Bezos has probably already offended his employees, deeply. A number of Post staffers, along with other Washington baseball reporters, seem intent on drawing a picture of a dysfunctional baseball franchise that keeps embarrassing itself. The fact is that all professional sports franchises are by definition dysfunctional because their billionaire owners keep them as luxurious pets, to be coddled, humored, and scolded when they make a mess of the furniture. What owners know, and the talent and the media don’t understand, is that the so-called big business of sports isn’t big business at all. If you want to make money, you go into something like finance, or real estate, like the Lerners, whose wealth is estimated around $4 billion. You don’t go into an industry that depends on the whims of spring and summer weather and an even more capricious customer base, fans. In real business, you are surrounded by real business people, like executives who know their worth and seek to leverage their advantage when it comes time to negotiate compensation. In baseball, management is often former athletes, who don’t know any better but to pout to the press when things don’t go their way.

Boswell says he likes the Nats’ owners. “The Lerners are good people,” he writes. “Their hearts are in the right place: dreaming of a title for their home town. The problem is with their ears. They don’t listen.” Ok, I’ll bite—who is it the Lerners should listen to?

Boswell is perhaps the gold standard of baseball writing, but it’s hard not to read him sometimes as just another Washington beat reporter willing to cash in common sense for the sake of a story. And luckily for Boswell, the Nats’ front office leaks against its internal rivals as much as the State Department. So what if the substance of the story is patently silly? It advances my relationship with a highly placed source, and besides, it’s a scoop—with my byline. Who is Boswell’s source in this article critical of the Lerners? I don’t know, but the Nats GM sure comes out of this looking good.

“As for Mike Rizzo,” writes Boswell, “a general manager who has built a team that has averaged 91 wins the past four seasons, [the Bud Black] episode doesn’t seem like how he does business.” Ok, maybe Rizzo didn’t leak the details of the Black story to Boswell, and frame it to make himself look like an innocent bystander watching a train wreck. And maybe Rizzo screamed at the Post reporter on the phone for jeopardizing his job by daring to suggest in print that there is any difference between how he and the people who sign his paycheck operate. But I doubt it.

We don’t know what really happened here, but given that Nats’ officials are leaking against ownership in typical bureaucratic Washington fashion through the Washington press corps, it’s not hard to surmise the intent of this CYA campaign. How about this: let’s say there were two final candidates for the manager’s job. The GM wanted Black but saw it was close so he needed to tip the scales. By leaking that Black had the job, he’d back Lerner into a corner so that if Black wasn’t picked the boss would look like an incompetent, if well-intentioned, baseball outsider who doesn’t understand how the business of the game works. Lerner called Rizzo’s bluff and picked Baker. He preferred Dusty, and perhaps wanted to remind Rizzo how he got to call the shots—you don’t become rich in the real business world without a pretty good sense of character. To save face in front of the professional community where he will someday have to go looking for a new job, Rizzo concocted an absurd story about a baseball lifer with nerves as fragile as a geisha’s.

In short, the Black episode really does highlight a problem in NatsWorld, but the clown show isn’t the Lerners.

**

It’s not clear just how much managers are really worth. Sure, there are top managers like Joe Maddon, who might very well be worth every penny of his $5 million salary. But how much of the Cubs’ success this past season is due to Maddon’s obsessive preparation, or the fact that a number of players had big years? Presumably the Cubs’ coaching staff has something to do with turning around Jake Arrieta, a former middle of the rotation starter who is a shoe-in for the Cy Young award this year. But Maddon didn’t arrange to have rookie Kris Bryant blossom into a star this summer.

Managers just aren’t seen to be as important as they were in the past, and maybe that view was always wrong, but personalities like Casey Stengel, Earl Weaver, Sparky Anderson, et al., were so big it was hard to get proper perspective. Tony LaRussa’s 33-year-long career rightly landed him in the Hall of Fame, but the Cardinals haven’t missed a beat since Mike Metheny took over in 2012 without any previous managerial experience. Terry Collins did a good job this year with a Mets team that far exceeded expectations, but he’s not the reason the club in Queens got to the World Series. And Ned Yost isn’t the reason the Royals won it.

The Mets have perhaps the best starting pitching in the major leagues, but the holes in that batting order are obvious—even when Daniel Murphy is making like Roy Hobbs and hitting a home run every game in the playoffs. Worse is the Mets defense, especially the infield, and there was nothing Collins could do to help Mets infielders pick up the baseball and throw it. Still, you can’t really blame Murphy or Lucas Duda for losing the Series with those particular miscues. The Royals would’ve capitalized eventually on some Mets’ mistake because that’s how truly good teams win ballgames in October—by scratching out runs against top-notch pitching staffs.

The most instructive inning during the World Series was the bottom of the 3rd in Game 4 at Citi Field. After a Michael Conforto home run, Wilmer Flores singled off Royals’ pitcher Chris Young, who then bounced a pitch in the dirt that moved Flores to second. Mets’ pitcher Steven Matz bunted Flores to third. He tagged and scored when Royals’ outfielder Alex Rios threw late to home after forgetting there were less than two outs. Rios’ mental blunder was the worst mistake the Royals made during the Series and the Mets made them pay for it with a run. But Kansas City exacted a price from the Mets for almost every mistake, at the plate, on the bases, and in the field. So they won the Series.

The key ingredients of the Royals’ success are hardly mysterious. They have good team speed and run the bases aggressively. They have a lights-out stopper in Wade Davis. And they catch the baseball. With the late-season addition of Johnny Cueto, the starting staff improved considerably, but it’s not as good as the Mets’ young arms. Yet it doesn’t matter very much how many studs you have who regularly clock out at 95 MPH plus if the people behind your staff don’t pick up the baseball very well. Even if your ace strikes out 10 batters, the other side still puts the ball in play at least 17 more times. If, in addition, the team you are playing knows how to squeeze out runs, you are almost certainly going to lose more than you win.

The Royals have a particular set of baseball values, prizing what the organization believes—rightly, I think—are key aspects of the game, like speed, putting the ball in play, and defense. The manager doesn’t create these values. Rather it is the organization that promotes and instills them. First the organization identifies these values through the kinds of amateur players it drafts and signs. In the minor leagues, the organization teaches the players to execute these values regularly. The learning curve is hard since failure to perform means you lose your job. Flushing players out of the organization reinforces values, as does rewarding the players who have perfected values by promoting them to the next level. Making it to the big league crowns values. The manager stands at the end of the process and is tasked with making the best use of what the organization hands him. That is, excellent organizations like the Royals, Cardinals, Cubs, and Pirates, among others, produce players who embody the system’s baseball values—lesser organizations that do not single out a set of baseball values can do no more than hand off raw talent. Anyone who has watched the Nationals over the last several years can’t help but conclude that the Washington club falls into the second category.

Can anyone say what exactly Washington Nationals baseball is? It’s certainly not team speed, defense, and putting the ball in play. No doubt the club suffered this past year because of injuries throughout the starting lineup, including most of the top of the lineup, Denard Span, Anthony Rendon, Jayson Werth, and Ryan Zimmerman. But look at the bigger picture—what, aside from very good starting pitching and Bryce Harper, is Nationals’ baseball? It’s great that Yunel Escobar had a career year, hitting .314. But how is it that a man who should not be allowed to pick up a baseball glove, not even in self-defense, was chosen for a key role on a contending team in the league that does not use the designated hitter? Are the Nats just winging it?

Yes, the club has shown a fair amount of power over the last few years, from Werth, Zimmerman, Adam LaRoche, as well as unlikelier sources in Rendon, Wilson Ramos, and Ian Desmond. But good pitching, the kind of pitching that takes a club to October, is going to shut down hitters, so how are you going to score runs then? And how do you keep the other team from scoring when you don’t field the ball very well behind your staff aces?

The reality is that the Nats are incoherent. From this perspective, Matt Williams did a bang-up job this year. The organization didn’t hand off to Williams any obvious baseball values, except for a solid starting staff, as well as one truly exceptional talent. And under Williams, Bryce Harper had a historic year. There’s no reason to believe he can’t do the same under Dusty Baker—and there’s also no reason to believe that the Nats will be a demonstrably better team in 2016. A team that has been in position to draft so much good amateur talent as the Nationals have since Rizzo took over in 2009 shouldn’t be improvising six years later.

The first thing the Washington baseball franchise needs to do is stop acting like a government bureaucracy and leaking to advance various agenda, and to cover their sundry tails. Rather, it should be figuring out what kind of baseball it means to play, and then build around the idea. Maybe the Nats’ incoming rookie shortstop Trea Turner is the pattern—good hands, good arm, great speed and therefore the ability to set the table for Harper. But if that’s the case, there are lots of pieces in that clubhouse that don’t fit the pattern.

In any case, congrats Dusty, and good luck—we’ll look forward to seeing you in the first base dugout, and around town.

Note: This piece has been updated.