By Yours Truly
http://throneberryfields.com/2017/10/20/the-nationals-dusty-trail-ends/Are the Nationals starting to feel like the worst of George Steinbrenner in the 1980s? Have they started
a team trend in which the manager gets fewer chances to bring them to the Promised Land? You might
think so now that Dusty Baker has refused a return engagement.
Baker led the Nats to back-to-back National League division series and the Nats never got past either.
But letting him walk after this year’s skirmish with the Cubs that ended in a cage match of a comedy
of errors just doesn’t seem right.
“I’m surprised and disappointed,” he told
USA Today. “They told me they would get back to me and I
told them I was leaving town yesterday and they waited ten days to tell me. I really thought this was
my best year. We won at least 95 games each year and won the division back to back years but they
said they wanted to go a different direction. It’s hard to understand.”
Baker’s successor will be the fourth Nats manager since 2013. No manager has lasted more than three
seasons since the franchise moved to Washington from Montreal. Are they trying to become the new
Steinbrenner?
You get the Nats being win-now with Bryce Harper about to enter the first walk year of his career. What
you don’t get is Baker paying for the sins of his players in this month’s division series. Baker’s not the
perfect manager for a team with postseason glory on its minds, but this wasn’t even close to his fault.
This time, Baker didn’t put a kind of gun to his bosses’ head about a new contract, the way he did when
his Giants lost a 2002 World Series they were eight outs from winning in Game Six. Oh, he barked a little
bit during the season about it, including the day he said he thought he was one of the more underpaid
skippers in the Show. The Nats have survived louder and nastier barkings than that.
“Baker’s contract is up,” wrote the
Washington Post‘s Barry Svrluga after the division series ended, “so it
isn’t really about firing him. It’s about bringing him back.” It’s also about his coaching staff. They all
expired after the Nats’ season ended, too. There’s a good chance of a new-look Nats brain trust come
spring training.
This time, Baker didn’t burn out his two best young pitchers, stand by while his clubhouse blew itself up
spending more time as enforcers than players, blow a wild card, and finish with two followup losing
seasons, as happened to his Cubs. Baker was smart enough to let pitching coach Mike Maddux shepherd
and manage the arms,
This time, he didn’t win once at home after taking the first two division series games on the road, or hook
his starting pitcher too late and blow a subsequent wild card game, the way he did with Johnny Cueto in
the 2013 game, which ended his tenure on the Reds’ bridge.
He didn’t blow up the Nationals’ clubhouse the way Matt Williams did in 2014. Baker didn’t always have
a Book to which he adhered without fail and without suffering fools who questioned it. And he wouldn’t
have even thought about being caught unaware if one of his players was damn fool enough to try choking
a teammate.
If anything, Baker made sure his clubhouse was harmonious and stood ready to protect players. He got
Ryan Zimmerman through a comeback season that could have gone the other way. He knew how to handle
the psyches of such veterans as Daniel Murphy, Jayson Werth, and Harper. And he knew how to shepherd
such oncoming youth as Trea Turner.
When Stephen Strasburg took ill as the division series shifted to Chicago during a spell of rain threats
that postponed Game Four, Baker got caught in a communications mixup about Strasburg’s condition
that yet enabled him to send Strasburg out to start the game when it could be played. A lot of observers
howled, but Baker was really doing nothing worse than trying to protect his pitcher.
The often-injured Strasburg pitched a masterpiece and made Game Five possible. That was the problem
—it made Game Five possible. And Game Five probably put paid to Baker’s Nats tenure through little to
no fault of his own.
“It was one of the most difficult decisions the ownership group and I have had to make since we’ve
been in Washington,” said general manager Mike Rizzo in a Friday teleconference with reporters.
“We’ve come such a long way. Winning a lot of regular season games and winning divisions is not
enough.”
Translation: Game Five sealed Baker’s fate, since the Nats decided it wouldn’t do to fire a suddenly
clumsy catcher, a couple of pinch hitters, and a bazillion dollar starter pressed into relief service and
forced to watch almost helplessly while his team fell apart completely.
The Cubs survived the cage match and went on to a National League Championship Series in which
they overmatched themselves against a Dodgers team without a lick of charity in their hearts or their
pitching staff.
Last year the Nats fell to the Dodgers in round one, when manager Dave Roberts decided Clayton Kershaw
could give him a save in the clincher. This year, they collapsed completely when Baker decided winning
Game Five meant bringing starter Max Scherzer in from the bullpen on two days’ rest—which meant
Scherzer’s between-starts throwing day, anyway.
Baker was playing to win. His Nats had a 4-3 lead going to the top of the fifth and starting pitcher Gio
Gonzalez looked shakier as the game went forward. So Baker reached for Scherzer, and Scherzer opened
the top of the fifth by getting rid of Kris Bryant on a ground out to shortstop and Anthony Rizzo on a fly
out to deep center field.
But Willson Contreras and Addison Russell collected back-to-back singles and Albert Almora, Jr. hit a two-
run double abetted by left fielder Werth completely misjudging the ball.
Then Scherzer and the Nats decided to put Jason Heyward on to pitch to Javier Baez. And strike three shot
past Nats catcher Matt Wieters. With plate umpire Jerry Layne maybe missing an interference call when
Baez’s bat bumped Wieters’s helmet, Wieters retrieved the ball and threw wild past first base and into
right field.
Cubs pinch hitter Tommy LaStella reached on catcher’s interference, Scherzer plunked Jon Jay, and suddenly
it was 7-4, Cubs. Bryant popping out to shortstop to end the fateful inning at last seemed like an act of
charity.
When Baker pinch hit Adam Lind with two on and nobody out in the eighth inning, Lind made it a classic case
of Rocky Bridges’ legendary postmortem:
I managed good, but boy, did they play bad. Lind dialed Area
Code 5-6-3 almost at once.
And it’s true that Baker didn’t think much about shifting his division series lineup in order to shake a few
reluctant coins out. Or, that he didn’t pinch hit for Wieters with the bases loaded while perhaps his best
pinch swinger, Howie Kendrick, was never told to poke his nose out of his hole.
It’s entirely possible that, if the Nats survived that insane in the brain Game Five, they might have been
sliced, diced, and pureed by that Dodger pitching staff, too. But just getting that far might have gotten
Baker his new contract.
Who’s to succeed him poses intriguing questions. Alex Cora might have, but the word is that the Red Sox
will bring him aboard to succeed the executed John Farrell as soon as the Astros' postseason ends. (Cora
is the Astros' bench coach.) Brad Ausmus, let go by the Tigers as they drop the hammer even further on
rebuilding, could be a topic.
Maybe Fredi Gonzalez—who took a once-collapsed collection of Braves to the wild card game the following
year, and who wasn’t to blame for the team’s clumsy entry into rebuild mode—would like a chance to see
what he can do with a live contender.
Maybe the Nats will find themselves in bidding wars for prospective candidates with several other teams,
including the Mets and the Phillies, looking for new helmsmen. But maybe this time the Nats will be willing
to break a troublesome tradition and offer something more than a couple of years and yeoman’s wages.
And maybe they’ll miss Baker a lot more than they think.
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