Jeff PassanESPN Shut up ESPN MLB insider Author of “The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports”
HOUSTON — Faith, says Dusty Baker, is the soul of humanity. And so he believes. He believes in the perfect guitar riff and the sound of waves crashing on the shore in Kauai. He believes in his family, who have supported him in this grueling career managing baseball teams for three decades. He believes in himself, even after all these coulds and shoulds, and he believes in his players, because the moment he gives up on them, what’s left? Baker is the truest of believers, unwavering and for much of his wonderful baseball life, his faith in men, with countless hours learning who they are and what fulfills them and why they play this game that every year ends in failure for 29 teams, defined him in all the wrong ways. Shut up
ESPN MLB insider Author of “The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports”
Baker never paid much attention to the criticism that he had never managed a team to win a World Series. Had he heard that — to those who seized more on the few games he lost than the many he won — he never would have had the courage to walk into a desperate Houston Astros clubhouse last October, minutes after the Atlanta Braves began are celebrating the 2021 World Series championship at the Houston ballpark, and offered the following words: “We’ll be back next year. We’ll win it.” He believed that too, as much as he believes in all the other things that interest him. He believes because he expects to win all the time, which is irrational, of course, but greatness and rationality are often at odds. They didn’t keep the Sabbath. The excellence of Baker’s Astros was found in a traffic collision with the most logical result: that this team so full of pitching, so crisp and elegant in the field, so timely with its hitting would dismantle the lucky Philadelphia Phillies. So it went on Saturday, a day that will forever be remembered here as the one in which the Astros defeated the Phillies 4-1 in Game 6 to deliver the organization’s second World Series championship — and the first not haunted by the scandal that brought Baker here to begin with. “I knew it was going to happen sooner or later,” Baker told ESPN amid the on-field celebration as he donned a gray championship T-shirt. “Stay close enough, it has to happen.” Baker knows it’s not that simple. He is now 73 years old, the oldest manager to ever record a World Series. He entered this October having won 2,093 regular season games and 40 more in the playoffs while being the first coach to lead five different organizations to the postseason. And yet the glory he tasted just once in his 19 seasons, in 1981 with the championship-winning Los Angeles Dodgers, eluded him as a manager in the 2002 and 2021 World Series, doomed him to be who he was good. but not good enough, tested his faith. He inherited an impossible situation, called in 2020 to shepherd a team that had fired its manager and general manager after it was revealed that the Astros had cheated during their previous major league season in 2017. Baker was beloved in the game and the his presence could divide that of the Astros, who would be fanatically supported in Houston, reviled and hated everywhere. But Baker refused to separate his own reputation from the team’s. Embrace Astros, warts and all, and temper the negativity. He was brought in to play a role — more pop psychologist than weed lord — and he did it masterfully.
2 Related Even though they had cheated, he wouldn’t let that define their next incarnations. They would create something new, something better. It wouldn’t erase the past, because nothing can, but it would stand by it as proof that this organization is more than a garbage can used to relay upcoming types of pitches in real-time batters. In a world where narratives are extremely attached to stories, Baker set out to write a competitive one that would change the perspective of the Astros — and himself, too. “He was an incredible coach,” said third baseman Alex Bregman, one of five remaining Astros from the 2017 team. “He was an incredible person, just on a personal level with every single person in our clubhouse. He loves the game of baseball. He’s dedicated his life to this game and he deserves it. He deserves it.” None of this, Baker said, was an accident — the American League run to a 106-win season, the efficient sweep of the Seattle Mariners and New York Yankees in the playoffs, the come-from-behind World Series victory. But he felt that fate and destiny and film, all the worldly goodies that accompany faith, supported his triumph. It was a coincidence that in Baker’s first game as a manager in 1993, the first hitter was Geronimo Peña, whose son, Jeremy, would go on to make a playoff run as a rookie and win the World Series MVP for the Astros ; It was fortuitous that the Astros, backed by a fan base that shared Baker’s faith, became the first team to win a World Series at home since 2013, allowing a raucous celebration to unfold before a crowd of 42,958 at Minute Maid Park, almost all of whom were left to enjoy the aftermath? It can. And also maybe not. At least it was poetic, responsive to the moment, because Dusty Baker’s World Series victory might never have happened without sticking to his principles — relying on a starting pitcher bigger than the modern game suggests or relying on reliable hitters despite their deep struggles. In the past, unconditional loyalty hindered Baker, foreshadowed his downfall. 2022 won him a championship. He let his players do what they do. Let the Astros be the best version of themselves. When the Astros fell behind in that World Series, the team-first culture that Dusty Baker cultivated carried the team — and carried Houston to a World Series title. AP Photo/David J. Phillip At 5:40 p.m. on Wednesday, the Houston Astros hitters met in the bullpen at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia. Less than 24 hours earlier, the Phillies’ lineup unleashed an unprecedented home run barrage, tagging Astros first baseman Lance McCullers Jr. for a World Series record five big balls. Game 3 of the World Series ended with a 7-0 loss and a 2-1 series deficit for the Astros, and Michael Brantley refused to take such embarrassment in silence. Bradley, 35, joined Houston in 2019, before news of the scandal broke, and re-signed in 2021, when a firestorm of hate for the team accompanied the return of fans to the stadiums. Brantley listens a lot more than he talks. A high-average, low-strikeout five-time All-Star, Brantley spent the last four months on the disabled list with a shoulder injury that required surgery, but that didn’t detract from his place on the clubhouse. . He showed up every day, quick with a pointer or a compliment. When Brantley asked hitters to gather in the bullpen, he intended to offer neither. Brantley was mad enough to hit coaches Alex Cintron, Troy Snitker and Jason Kanzler, aware of his frustration, he left before the meet began. Only the players had to hear what Bradley had to say. The Astros, Brantley said, are an extremely good team — and unless something changes, they will lose the World Series, just as they did to the Washington Nationals in 2019 and the Braves last year. In Game 3, they let a group of Phillies pitchers control the tempo and hit them, he said, and they had to play their own baseball. No more complacency. No more losses. Six years earlier, during a 17-minute rain delay between the ninth and 10th innings of Game 7 of the World Series, Chicago Cubs fan Jason Heyward gave a speech that lives in tradition as the catalyst behind the first championship of the franchise after 108 years. Brantley found himself on the other side as an outfielder for Cleveland, the Cubs’ rival. Until this season, he had been a part of three teams that missed the World Series. He couldn’t last a quarter. “I’m tired of giving sad hugs,” Bradley told the group. The response was immediate. “We were all about to run through a brick wall,” Astros first baseman Trey Mancini said. “He’s someone I’ve admired tremendously throughout my career. I mean, the model of consistency. His words carry a lot of weight. He meant a lot to us. He turned the game around.”
The Astros completed an incredible postseason run with their second title since 2017. How Jeremy Pena Replaced an Icon ‘Inside Justin Verlander’s First WS Win’ Are the Astros inevitable? » | What is their secret? » The word of Brantley’s monologue soon filtered down to Astros pitchers. They bolstered the team during the season and for much of the postseason, as the struggles of shortstop José Altuve and slugger Yordan Álvarez burdened the offense. And in Game 4, they ran into the bullpen of the Phillies offense, twirling a combined no-hitter. The offense, meanwhile, touched Philadelphia for five runs in the fifth inning to record a 5-0 victory and even the series. “I didn’t like the way we responded in Game 3,” Brantley said four days later as the music blared and champagne corks popped at the Astros’ celebration. “They hit Lance hard and we didn’t do anything to respond. We didn’t get into their bolt to use their primary weapons. We didn’t do our job. We made our job harder. So I wanted to let everyone know that if we STAYED together, we did what we do, we played our way, that didn’t matter. I wanted to do it again. “It was straight from my heart, what I believe, what I felt, I went to bed that night thinking about it. I woke up that morning and I just had to do it. I had to say it.” After the win, the Astros players awarded Bradley the player of the game for a game in which he did not play. “That was probably the best speech I’ve ever been a part of,” said Altuve, the longest-tenured Astro. “He came to us, had a little meeting and…
