THE MANAGERS WHO CAN’T GET IT DONE? BAKER AND BOCHY SURE DO, AT AGE 142
The likes of Dave Roberts and Brandon Hyde, both swept from the playoffs, can't hide behind the continued postseason duties of two men who were supposed to be in rocking chairs but could win it all
Please don’t classify this as mere Old School, the current wanderings of two gray men who are luxuriant grandfathers. This would be from the last century, a previous millennium, before the steroids era, back in the 1990s, when baseball was overrun as the sports kingpin by the NFL and Michael Jordan. This is when Bruce Bochy and Dusty Baker were launched as major-league managers.
Those were times when the highest-paid skipper would become Joe Torre, at almost $8 million a year. Today, beyond rampant analytics and the painful shame of lightweight TV ratings, the American League championship series is managed by Hall of Famers who sat alone for the longest time waiting for calls to work again. Together, they are 142 years old and don’t take home nearly as much salary, combined, as Torre did. Their craft is going backwards, yet by pure definition of their skill, regardless of age, they are saying no to the underpayment and scorn of youthful general managers who still think games are won via data.
What they’ve done is remarkable. Baker was called to save the Houston Astros from scandalous humiliation and produced a World Series title, this time without a center field camera, a video replay room and trash cans by the dugout. Bochy was phoned, not long after winning three titles in San Francisco, to remove the Texas Rangers from a roll call of six clubs never to win it all. Starting Sunday, they will conduct welcomed conflict between them because it gives wheels to a game that needs a national charge.
Notice how younger managers are flailing in the postseason with better regular-season teams. Their struggles give rise that MLB should provide extra advantages to first-place victors, such as those claiming 100-plus wins. Think Bochy and Baker care about the collapse of the Los Angeles Dodgers, whose faulty baseball operations president left them without pitching help and pressured Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman to finish 1 for 21 in a stunning sweep by the Arizona Diamondbacks, who trailed by 16 games in the National League West standings. Think they care about the late flaws of the 101-win Baltimore Orioles, who played like a fraud against the Rangers. Or the brinkage of the 104-win Atlanta Braves.
Don’t preach to Bochy, who at 68 has 15 postseason wins, giving him the best all-time record of those who’ve managed 10 playoff rounds. Only six ever have managed more games than his 4,200. If he beats the Astros, he’ll be with a third different franchise in the Series. Yet the last three autumns, he has gone fishing, played golf and watched baseball on television. He doesn’t want to hear about the problems of Dave Roberts and Brandon Hyde.
“I’m having the time of my life,” Bochy said. “It’s been a little bumpy, the ups and downs, but it’s been a great ride. You have to savor it, enjoy these rides, appreciate them.”
And don’t tell Baker, who at 74 is three decades past his start in San Francisco, before Bochy, and didn’t win a Series until last year. He managed the Giants and Chicago Cubs, sat out a year, managed the Cincinnati Reds, sat out two seasons, managed the Washington Nationals, then sat two years before owner Jim Crane hired him to bail out the stinking Astros. It’s possible this will be the end of Dusty, especially if he hits back-to-back titles for the first time in MLB since 2000. Don’t remind him about the issues of others.
“This is everybody. This is a team win,” Baker said after beating Minnesota in four games. “Hey, me and Bruce Bochy need to battle. Amen. They know us. We know them. We know Bruce. He knows me.”
Imagine that they’re here, through health problems and wonderment about the sport’s future in front offices. Amazing how their players mention the same traits. “He is just a calming presence, and the team vibes with that,” said pitcher Max Scherzer, who joined the Rangers in July after wreckage with the world’s most overpaid sports team, the New York Mets.
And who joins him in Texas? Justin Verlander, who also left the Mets ship and says of Baker, who will give him his 36th career postseason start: “We wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the bond we have and the relationships that we have in this locker room, and we hold each other accountable in a good way. Obviously, this team is built different. These guys are built different. When it's time to step up, we play our best baseball.”
So let the losers moan. Said Roberts, who might be replaced as the Dodgers eyeball Shohei Ohtani and a new start after a series of 100-win abominations: “There's some things with the format that people can dissect or whatever, but the bottom line is that the last two years we've gotten outplayed in the postseason. It doesn't matter if it was a seven-game series; we lost the first three games. For me, I've got to do a better job of figuring out a way to get guys prepared for the postseason. I'll own that. I think we've got great players. I've got to figure out a way to get these guys prepared for whatever format, whatever series. Yeah, the regular season, I think we do a great job. But the last couple of postseasons, it just hasn't gone well for us, and so I've got to figure it out.”
“They kept punching us in the face, and we weren't able to get back up,” said the Dodgers’ Enrique Hernandez, of the Diamondbacks and their four consecutive home-run hitters. “There's not a lot of words other than hurt, disappointed, frustrated. We're a little embarrassed.”
Then there’s Baltimore, where Hyde was gone quickly after six glorious months. “The format is unusual where you win a division and have this much time off before you play,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s a disadvantage, but it puts you in a different routine than you are during the regular season and what you’re used to. Our guys played their butts off for six months. We didn’t play well the last three games, unfortunately.”
One hundred and sixty-two games and you’re eliminated in just three? It’s a grotesque, startling disillusionment that can alter clubs. Unless MLB wants to shorten seasons so Thanksgiving isn’t involved and add longer playoff series — sure, right. Thirty owners are too busy making money they aren’t paying to the damned managers. A sport with $10.8 billion in revenue this season is paying $3 million to only seven skippers. The leader is San Diego’s Bob Melvin, who missed the playoffs and almost lost his gig, and Buck Showalter, fired by the Mets. These people take the brunt of public backlash while the owners and GMs hide away.
Tough, say the two crusty dudes. The Astros and Rangers don’t like each other, including a weird shot taken by Texas general manager Chris Young after Houston survived to win the AL West title. When third baseman Alex Bregman said in the clubhouse, “We celebrate titles in Houston. A lot of people were wondering what it was going to be like if the ‘Stros didn't win the division. I guess we'll never know.”
A reporter who covers the Astros and works for MLB.com, Brian McTaggart, posted the video online and said, “The Rangers partied last night while the Astros had a champagne toast and quickly turned their attention to Sunday and one more win. Houston's ‘been-there, done-that' mentality paid off, it seems.”
Young should have ignored it. He lit a firestorm. “I find it ridiculous that's even a subject, honestly,” he said. “This is the most professional, responsible group of players that I've ever been around. We had a very subdued champagne popping, but beyond that there was, there was no partying. There was nothing outlandish. It's pretty poor journalism to even suggest that, honestly. I’m very disappointed in the lack of professionalism of the Houston journalist for putting that out there. It's classless and it's not appropriate and it's completely fabricated. It's wrong.”
And who gave his manager the big phone call last year? Young. “I’m blessed,” Bochy said. “I’m grateful he gave me a call.”
The biggest response comes Sunday. Two OGs, though don’t call them that, will control the fireworks. Gosh, what might they say on TikTok?
###
Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.