WASHINGTON -- After Game 1 of the National League Division Series, when the Cubs beat Washington in a tightrope duel that underscored just how thin the margin is between winning and losing, the local postgame radio show featured caller after caller blaming the manager, Dusty Baker, for not finding a way to win a game in which his team that scored 819 runs in the regular season generated a grand total of two hits and no runs.
It had been just one game after a 97-win season, and a playoff opener instead of a season-ending decider, but Damian, a D.C. cab driver, had gone dark, into the supernatural space usually reserved for 100-year droughts and Bill Buckner. "The Nationals are great during the regular season," he said, resigned. "Once the playoffs begin, it's like, you know, they're cursed. They can't do anything."
There was coding inside the code words: The team was cursed and the manager was the problem -- even though Baker had won 95 and 97 games, respectively, in his only two seasons in Washington, had restored the professionalism that had abandoned the Nationals when Matt Williams, the previous manager, had lost the clubhouse and the star player (Bryce Harper) and veteran reliever (Jonathan Papelbon) were throwing hands in the dugout by the end of the season in an embarrassing fight captured on TV. The fans, fatalistic and hungry for their franchise to get out of the division series for the first time in its 12-year history, resemble Darth Vader in "The Empire Strikes Back," ready to sacrifice another leader who disappoints them.
The resignation continued until it didn't. The Nationals went out Saturday night, getting a lead, giving it back and losing without much resistance -- until scoring five exciting, improbable runs in the eighth and stealing Game 2, 6-3.
Such is life in the crucible of managing; everybody spilling nacho sauce on their shirts thinks they can do the job -- but these days it carries with it one important exception: The Nationals front office seems to think the same way as its fans. Each twist of the series carries with it the added knowledge that Baker has no contract for the 2018 season, the implicit message being his future is being evaluated not by his stabilizing the organization and winning for the last two years, but by what the Nationals do in the playoffs.
Baker is the most extreme example of a widening division of labor in baseball, one in which the front offices are allowed to appear gilded. The Moneyball generation of front-office executives, armed with cannons of data and Ivy League degrees, diffuses the pressure that ostensibly it should shoulder by referring to the randomness of the postseason as a "crap shoot," yet simultaneously seems comfortable with firing managers if they do not win. The gap is obvious: GMs trade on their elite status and education, while growing increasingly detached from the consequences of their results. There is plenty wrong with that.
Meanwhile, their field managers sweat inning by inning, contract by contract. Joe Girardi, the 10-year incumbent of the New York Yankees, is not signed to return next season, even though he took his young Yankees to the playoffs a year early. Paul Molitor, the Twins Hall of Famer, took over a team expected to fail and reached the playoffs -- and his reward was to wait patiently for a new three-year deal, the team announced Monday.
In Washington, over two games against the battle-tested defending world champions, every key sequence and missed opportunity was accompanied by a hovering question: Was Anthony Rendon's inability to come up with Javier Baez's sixth-inning chopper (which led to two unearned runs and ruined Stephen Strasburg's 10-whiff masterpiece) going to cost Baker his job? Or the next night, when the Nationals finally broke free and the leaders led, the question was whether Bryce Harper's and Ryan Zimmerman's home runs had saved Baker's job.
On Monday, Baker pulled a dominant Max Scherzer after 6 1/3 innings but 98 pitches in a stinging Game 3 loss. The Nationals have pitched well enough to have swept this series and yet the Cubs can say exactly the same. A crap shoot, indeed.
Over the years, baseball, in its treatment of Baker, has acted like the publicly traded company that lays off employees not because it is losing money, but because it isn't making enough. In his two years in Washington, Dusty Baker has won the NL East both times. In his 22 seasons, he has won 90 or more games 10 times, made the playoffs eight times and won a pennant. He's the active leader in managerial wins and 14th all-time. Baker was let go by San Francisco after winning the 2002 National League pennant but losing the World Series. He was fired by Cincinnati after two division titles and consecutive playoff appearances -- and was out of baseball for two years. Meanwhile, Bryan Price, who replaced Baker in Cincinnati, has never had a winning season, lost 372 games in four years and finished 36, 35.5 and 24 games out of first place the past three, last-place seasons. While Baker sweats, Cincinnati picked up Price's option on Sept. 4, nearly a month before season's end. He has lost 90 games three straight years.
The playoffs are certainly important, and if a manager cannot navigate them -- say, like Girardi getting too cute by removing CC Sabathia after 77 pitches with an 8-3 lead in a must-have Game 2 of the ALDS -- then consequences surely await. The two games in Washington, however, hardly suggest a mandate of incompetence or fireable offense. Baker has been at the mercy of his team.
This is no way to live. Upper management is allowed to shield itself with randomness, while the expectation of the field manager has shifted to overcoming the painfully slim, faithfully unsentimental margins of October baseball. What information ownership seeks in a five-game series that it did not discover over the previous eight months is something of a mystery. This added, recent pressure on managers to win more as the playoffs expand is a bad trend, especially as the two greatest postseasons of the game's most successful GM, Theo Epstein, were highlighted by an impossible comeback with the 2004 Red Sox, and living on the edge every day during last year's playoffs, in which rallying from a 3-1 series deficit was required to finally deliver the Cubs a championship. Baker is just the latest example of the front office crushing its own, for it should be remembered that had the Yankees finished off the Red Sox up three games to none in 2004, the same scenario that is surrounding Baker was expected to play itself out in Boston. Terry Francona, who in the years since has proved himself a Hall of Fame manager, was likely going to be fired in Boston. Imagine that.