Dusty Baker
Dusty Baker
Johnnie B. "Dusty" Baker, Jr.is an American Major League Baseball manager and former player. He is currently the manager for the Washington Nationals. He enjoyed a 19-year career as a hard-hitting outfielder, primarily with the Atlanta Braves and Los Angeles Dodgers. He helped the Dodgers to pennants in 1977 and 1978 and to the championship in 1981. He then enjoyed a 20-year career as a manager with the San Francisco Giants, Chicago Cubs, Cincinnati Reds, and now Washington Nationals. He...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCoach
Date of Birth15 June 1949
CityRiverside, CA
CountryUnited States of America
Baseball's not separate from the world. (Racism) is real. Nobody wants to talk about it. You don't hear guys talk in depth too much, especially minority guys, because you get accused of playing the race card.
Missing almost the second half of the season last year really slowed his progress some. Skill-wise, he has the skill. We know that. It's just a matter of him playing and doing the little things. He works hard.
Todd did a good job playing first base in Spring Training. He likes playing first base. He'll play first most of the time and second base some of the time.
It's just not playing good defense. They're playing hard. Playing hard isn't good enough. You have to play to win and play to win every day, and that's what we're here for.
We're going to give him as much playing time as possible this week, so we can make up our mind. I'm sure when you get to this point in your career you consider all the possibilities, and I'm sure he's doing some evaluation of his own abilities. So, yeah, these are important days for him.
We don't have a whole bunch of kids, ... Really, we have two kids as (position) players. Most of our kids are pitchers. We're going to play them. They're going to get ... I can't say the majority of playing time ... (but) they're going to play.
They're playing hard, we just didn't play good defense. You can't give runs away in the major leagues, even at the end of the season. You have to play to win every day, and our defense didn't do that.
They're playing hard. Corey circled the ball and missed and, like I said, we just played bad defense today.
Back in our day, they called this 'salary drive,' ... Try and continue to have a good year and win as many games as you can win. You are playing for respectability right now. What I'm looking for is you play hard and play for love of the game and respect and try to finish as high as you can.
You're playing against guys who are younger than you, so you can set them up. You get to a certain point in your career and you almost know what's coming. You learn to trust your feelings. Hank Aaron told me you don't become a great player until you learn to trust your feelings.
You're always worried about injuries. But I can remind Carlos all I want to. When you get out there and Cuba or whoever they're playing starts banging him around pretty good, I think he'll forget exactly what I told him. That's how it is.
He went that long on a team that's not playing well without being re-signed. I'm sure it came through his mind. Whenever anybody gets fired, it's tough.
This is judgment time for who's going to be playing next year too. You're not only playing for now. You're playing for 2006 as well.
This is judgement time for who is going to be here and who's going to be playing next year, too,