Over at SI, Tom Verducci has an entertaining article about our manager. It’s your must-read for today:
At the age of 61, and back for his 18th try at managing a World Series winner, Cincinnati manager Dusty Baker, a guy who in the first place didn’t want anything to do with managing, has become one of the game’s great treasures, even more so now that colleagues Bobby Cox, Joe Torre, Lou Piniella and Cito Gaston retired after last season. Baker blends old-school baseball values with a hipster’s love of what’s current, constantly engaging his young Reds players in conversations about music, fashion, cars, travel and just about anything else.
Dusty gets a really bad rap about a lot of things. On the flip side of that coin, he does a ton of things with which I completely disagree (and we chronicle those things every day here). Despite that, I’ve said for a long time that if I had a chance to spend an evening talking to any member of the Cincinnati Reds organization, I’d choose Dusty and it wouldn’t even be a difficult choice. He seems like the most interesting man on the planet.
