Well, Who Should We Blame?

If you read Rick Morrissey’s column “Laying all blame on Baker not fair” in the Tribune, you saw that the counter-backlash to all of the Dusty Baker backlash has begun. I’m singling out Morrissey, but this is also what we hear from the Cubs management and staff. The central point is that the Cubs collapse cannot be entirely the manager’s fault. I agree with Morrissey, and I think it’s awful how venomous some people become. No one is saying Morrissey and Hendry and the others don’t have a point. Yet, while this is true, I also think this is an example of the media and the Cubs staff trying to have it both ways.

Cubs fans have always had the reputation for being extremely intelligent and well-informed about the game of baseball, and about their team. That reputation gave the media machine a reason to exist during the lean years: fans still cared. More important, perpetuating that reputation is one of the ways that the team tries to market itself. At least it used to be. They made us sound even better than we were in order to attract more fans.

So, while I agree with them that the noisiest criticism of Dusty Baker has been too strong and too general and too uninformed, the issue is not so simple. The team cannot celebrate and market its fans for being smart, and for supporting them through bad years, but then turn on them when they get understandably upset. This is what they must admit, but won’t: the questions we have regarding Dusty Baker’s tactics and decisions in 2005 are very reasonable.

The reputation of the fan base has diminished the last few years as the fan base exploded. The rise in popularity probably did dilute the fan base. It’s true that a lot more of these fans seem less-informed; if you listen to the general chatter, it’s a lot of opinions, but hardly any reasoned arguments or analysis. As a result, it’s kind of easy to say that this group is over-simplifying the matter when they blame Dusty. That’s fine.

Yet, those of us that follow this team as closely as anyone have legitimate criticisms. If 2003 had never happened, and you subtracted all of the new noisemaking fans who jumped on board, the rest of us would still have very pointed questions about what we’re watching. We haven’t been second-guessing decisions. We’ve been upset at the time, and then we’ve watched events unfold as we feared more often than not.

Speaking for myself, I turned on Dusty later this year than most fans. I thought that for a long time circumstances tied his hands. I didn’t like what he was doing, but I thought his other options were as bad or worse.

The specific criticisms against Dusty are well-documented, but here’s what I think is the simplest way to distill them: Dusty Baker does not manage the Cubs as if they are a team that will have to win a lot of close games, which we all knew they would be the moment Nomar went down in April.

His lineups, his double switches and his bullpen management all work against a team with the Cubs construction. I am as sympathetic as anyone about not having the pieces he needs, but he could have used the pieces he had to their strengths more than he did. That’s been the kernel of my disappointment with Dusty Baker.

I’m not apologizing for the players. They have a responsibility to perform, and they often haven’t. That’s certainly part of it. It’s just that we all knew this would be a streaky team, and that there would be stretches where this would work against them. I think it was fair to want a style of management that aimed to temper these tendencies during the cold streaks. We have yet to see it.

A good manager will adjust his style to the tools he has to work with. Dusty has not done this in the 2005 season. If the Cubs start a miraculous comeback, I’m pretty well convinced it will be despite him.

A friend of mine suggested that Baker could be a great bench coach, like Don Zimmer. By all accounts players like him, and it's possible that he's the best manager in the league during the 21 hours of the day outside the game that we don't get to see what he does. That's probably a stretch, but even if it's true, it's small solace.

I’m not saying he couldn’t manage a different team well, or that he couldn’t manage a different Cubs team well, or that he’s a bad manager. I’m saying he has managed the 2005 Cubs badly. At the moment, that’s all that really matters.