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
Usually you come right in and face 'live,' but you get into bad habits because you're trying to protect your hands and protect your bats. Basically, this is more for the pitchers the first couple days than the hitters. The main thing is, you hope they can throw strikes.
He needs to pitch. Even though he has the skill and ability, he needs the innings. He needs to be in certain situations. He's missed more than a couple years here on and off. He needs the endurance. He needs to be in there with bases loaded with no outs and be in all kinds of situations and adverse situations. The main thing is we want him healthy, too.
He's just keeping up with (Curt) Schilling. They're both 3-0. His main thing is strike one. When you get strike one, then you can do a lot of things - inside, outside, up and down. The name of the game is control. He was great.
You've got to throw strikes. That's with most young guys. Throw strikes, throw quality strikes. Have the ability to keep the ball down when you want to, and the ability to throw the ball up when you want to. When you throw the ball outside, you don't want it to creep back inside. The main thing is just relax. Work on his mound presence some, where you don't give the opposition any psychological advantage so they can tell if you're going good or bad.
His main thing is he's trying so hard he's not swinging at strikes. They're not getting him out, he's getting himself out. I've talked to him about it. When they come in the zone, he's not far from it. It's like fishing. You got to get that first one in the boat, everything is cool after that.
The main thing is for us to dwell on the solution and not the problem. Just be more alert and more advantageous of all situations, not create advantageous situations for them with mental and physical errors.
The main guy will get the majority of the playing time. Is that 60 percent? Is that 70 percent? Is that 51 percent? I'll talk to them. Quite frankly, that's a fortunate situation to have three quality guys. It's not a problem; it's a fortunate situation.
I think the main problem was he couldn't feel the ball in his fingers. I guess it's cold, and the ball is a little slicker when it's cold, and he really couldn't feel it. Consequently, he starts trying to drop down, different things to try to command the strike zone, and he had trouble commanding the strike zone.
If you know Carlos, when was the last time you saw Carlos take it easy? This is something out of our hands. The main thing we want to do is make sure he's in the best shape. After he leaves here, he's out of our domain and control except for reports.
It got a little hairy there when we had a 3-0 lead and Delgado hit that home run. But that was the only mistake Zambrano made.
I think that's wrong because that way you're placing blame on one department,
Just a sad day on the pitching side.
Just because you can hit, doesn't mean you know how to play winning baseball, ... That's what I'm trying to instill here, and it's not easy to do in the short time I've been here.
I said, 'At times,' ... It's not an overall, long, extended, everybody issue. It's at times. There's a difference. If I contradicted myself, I'm sorry. It's at times. You've seen it. I've seen it, too. At times. Those are isolated incidents.