CROSSROADS

The baseball legend recalls his long career in the game.

Fast and lean, Baker, born in a rural corner of Southern California (“I was raised country all the way”), excelled in football and basketball as a student, the latter being “my first true love in sports.” He was offered college scholarships in football, basketball, and track—but not baseball, no surprise given his high school team’s poor performance in his senior year. Even so, thanks to an insightful scout, he was drafted by the Atlanta Braves as an 18-year-old. Under the tutelage of none other than Hank Aaron, Baker flourished, playing in the A-league before going up to the majors. From there, he earned a solid reputation as an ace outfielder and a fierce hitter, following a maxim from Roy Campanella: “Take a good whack at it and don’t miss. You don’t foul it off. You don’t overswing. You don’t miss it.” Baker went on to play for the Dodgers, earning further distinction, then went on to coach and manage five teams before finally winning a World Series, “my mission and my mandate,” with the Houston Astros in 2022. He takes a generally amiable and instructive stance throughout, with some pleasing anecdotes along the way—memorably, smoking a joint with Jimi Hendrix. But the crossroads of his title are many, tests that sometimes threatened to break him: a lawsuit filed against him by his own father, a seemingly endless battle with the IRS over taxes, cancer, racism. Sometimes his play-by-play accounts of individual games go on a bit too long, but his lessons learned are well taken, as when he writes, “Baseball is more like life than any other sport, with the ups and downs and daily highs and lows you have to deal with.” Indeed.

A pleasure for fans of the old-school game, when titans strode the diamond.