Dusty Baker’s case for Cooperstown has been building for years, and now it’s officially on the board.
Baker is one of eight candidates on the Contemporary Baseball Era ballot for managers, executives and umpires, a group announced Monday that could send him to the National Baseball Hall of Fame as early as next year. The ballot also features Sandy Alderson, Bruce Bochy, Joe Maddon, Lou Piniella, Brian Sabean, Ted Turner and Bill White, a collection of names that reflects how many different ways people have shaped the game since the late 20th century.
A 16-member panel made up of Hall of Fame players, Major League executives, media members and historians will weigh the candidates. A player needs at least 75% of the vote to get in, and the results for the Class of 2027 will be revealed on Sunday, Dec. 6.
For Baker, the Hall conversation is nothing new, even if he’s not the one driving it.
"It's not on my mind as much as other people put it on my mind," Baker said Wednesday. "I get these congratulatory texts and stuff like that and [I respond], 'I'm not in the Hall yet.'
There's a lot of competition this year. This is a stacked ballot, and plus I hope everybody doesn't cancel everybody else out.
You've got to get 75 percent of the votes and they've got some very, very qualified candidates. Somebody is going to be disappointed."
Baker, 77, made those comments Monday at CLASS Bookstore in Houston, where he was appearing to discuss his memoir, Crossroads: A Memoir in Baseball and Life. Keith Watson, son of Astros Hall of Fame slugger Bob Watson, moderated the conversation.
The Hall of Fame case starts with the numbers, but Baker’s story has always gone beyond them. He was a standout player with the Braves, Dodgers, Giants and A’s before moving into coaching and eventually into a managerial career that stretched across 26 seasons and five franchises.
He became a coach with San Francisco and spent five seasons on the Giants’ staff, including four years as hitting coach from 1989-92. When he took over as manager in 1993, the Giants went 103-59 in his first season and he won NL Manager of the Year.
Baker stayed in San Francisco through 2002 and guided the Giants to the playoffs in 1997, 2000 and ’02. That ’02 club reached the World Series before falling to the Angels in seven games. After that, he moved to Chicago and managed the Cubs from 2003-06, coming within one win of getting them to the World Series for the first time since 1945.
His next stop was Cincinnati, where he managed the Reds from 2008 through 2013 and took them to the postseason in 2010, ’12 and ’13. Baker then led the Nationals to playoff berths in both 2016 and 2017, and later took over the Astros before the pandemic-shortened 2020 season.
Houston is where the long wait ended. Baker won his first World Series title with the Astros in 2022, then retired after the 2023 season.
His regular-season total of 2,183 wins ranks eighth all-time. He also won division titles with five different teams and took clubs to pennants in both leagues, doing it with the Giants in the National League in 2002 and with the Astros in the American League in 2021-22.
Baker said former Giants general manager Al Rosen told him when he was hired that he was destined to be fired, like most managers before him.
"I said, 'No, Al,'" Baker said with a laugh. "I was actually fired once in Cincinnati and my contract expired the other times.
It’s damn near the same thing. The thing that people tell me, 'Congratulations on five different teams,' this and that.
In my mind, it shouldn’t have been five teams. They say, 'Congratulations on your Manager of the Year [Award] three times.'
In my mind, you know when you do a good job and you know when you don't do a good job. And most of the time I thought I did a good job, and I thought I was deserving a couple of more times."
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