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
I was pulling for him to get one more hit to get to 200. It's even more for him to shoot for next year.
It's easier to teach them to pull than use the whole field.
They're a lock, but we have to get Prior to that point first. He's on schedule to do that but until he actually gets out there, we don't know. You don't know if somebody is going to come up sore, or somebody is going to pull something or whatever.
You would think over the course of a winter -- actually three winters, two winters -- that guys would come back strong and healthy, which hasn't been the case. Woody had a little setback with his knee, but his arm is doing well. He's throwing the ball great. Hopefully, Woody will be ready soon. How soon we don't know. We have Wade Miller coming on pretty strong. We just have to pull our belts a little tighter and do what we have to do.
The final words were that our guys here will pull for them and give them some love. I asked the guys who they were rooting for, and everybody is rooting for their own country.
We're going to miss him big time but we know we're going to get him back, too.
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're going to fit him in right away.
What thing with Tony? If there had been a thing, somebody would have thrown some blows or something. There was no thing. We had a discussion.
What he gave me was a consciousness on how to do it,
Usually, if he makes a mistake, they don't hit him out of the ballpark with that sinker, ... He made a mistake; that's what happens with youth. We have a young pitching staff and a young bullpen that's subject sometimes to walks and also subject to mistakes.
With the injury he had, the biggest hurdle is everything. It's an injury to his core, which controls everything: getting out of bed, getting in and out of the car, getting up and down, hitting, fielding, throwing.
When you saw that Ecsktein went down that's when you know the field is too sloppy to play on.
We were a lot closer before I got here. When you play 18 times against teams that have been long-time rivalries, and then it's against my former manager and my confidant before I came here, it increases things.