“Dusty: A Baseball Journey” includes interviews with childhood friends, relatives, Aaron, former Dodgers manager Tom Lasorda and athletes Baker managed. Baker spoke candidly of racism and what he and Aaron faced, especially Aaron when he chased Ruth’s hallowed mark, and how his relationship with his demanding father moulded him.
“It’s been a great ride,” Baker, 66, said in the documentary. “Has it been up and down? Oh, heck yeah, it’s been up and down. But when I look back, I wouldn’t trade anything. I know the best is yet to come.”
The growing pains were daunting. His father, Johnnie B. Baker Snr, was strict and unrelenting, cutting Baker from youth baseball teams three times for his attitude. Those lessons inspired Baker, the oldest of five kids.
As a child, Baker helped his father mow lawns but wasn’t paid. The old man kept the earnings,
reminding his son that his shoes and dinner were his payment.
Nearly 50 years ago, Baker’s family moved from Riverside to Fair Oaks, and he excelled at Del Campo, a predominantly white school in a predominantly white neighbourhood that was a stark contrast to his time in Riverside. The move north was hard on
Baker, but it helped shape him.
“My dad got a job at McClellan, so we moved, and I didn’t want to move,” Baker told me two years ago at Sacramento’s Dante Club. “I was really upset. I cried. But it was the best thing for me. I wanted to play everything. I wanted to be like Bobby Bonds, the best prep athlete I ever saw. Del Campo was an adjustment. I asked my brother, Victor, on the first day of school, ‘Hey, you see any other black kids here?’ ‘Nope. Just us.’ It was enlightening. I learned to get along with everyone, to be strong.”
Eli McCullough, then Del Campo’s basketball coach, once recalled in a Sacramento Bee story how Baker’s arrival sent a jolt through campus. McCullough said a student rushed into his physical education office, yelping, “Coach, come quick! You’ve got to see this!”
What the coach saw amazed him.
“It was Dusty Baker, doing anything he wanted on the floor, and I was speechless,” McCullough said. “I said, ‘Oh, my God. Praise the Lord, and thanks!’ Dusty Baker helped make this school and touched a lot of us.”
Baker scored every which way in football; averaged 15 points and 13 rebounds in basketball; won the 100-yard dash in 9.8 seconds, sometimes in his baseball spikes; and won high jump competitions despite little or no practice.
The MLB program touches on Baker’s decision to sign a baseball contract with Atlanta in 1967 against the wishes of his father, who wanted him to attend Santa Clara to play basketball. Baker’s mother, Christine, asked Aaron to watch over her son. Said Aaron in the documentary: “You could tell (Baker) had major-league star written all over him.”
And Baker said in the film that Aaron “meant everything” to him.
Baker’s high-five moment was pure happenstance. He had 29 home runs entering the final game of the 1977 season against the Houston Astros, and Lasorda challenged him to swat one more so the Dodgers could become the first team to have four players with 30 homers in a season.
After taking JR Richard deep, Baker was greeted by teammate Glenn Burke, who held his palm up. Baker, not sure how to react, slapped it.
Baker has had a high-five sort of life, one that includes music, gardening, authoring a book and winning.
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