“Crossroads: A Memoir in Baseball and Life”
The author: Dusty Baker
The details: Crown Publishing/Penguin Random House, 416 pages, $32, to be released June 9, ‘26
The links: The publisher, Bookshop.org
A review in 90 feet or less:
Johnny B. Baker Jr. has had a good number of moments that he refers to as “crossroads”as he comes up on his 77th birthday.
At least, a baker’s dozen moments. When things could have headed down some dusty road full of potholes and a road block of regrets.
To all of us who feel some cosmic connection to Baker — tossing him bubblegum as he ran out to his left-field position at Dodger Stadium during his eight seasons, seeing him in the visitors’ dugout during the Angels’ 2002 World Series title that managed to get away from him — here is the road that opens up for us to travel back with him, to reconnect, and to understand.
Whether it’s lyrics he’s hung onto from Elvin Bishop, a song by Miles Davis, leadership advice he has gleaned from Bill Walsh or Al Attles, Baker lets us feel as we’re part of his “grand counsel of advisers,” people he could lean into “anytime I was at a crossroads,” as he writes on page 253.
“I wasn’t always read to hear what they might have to tell me — or show me,” he writes. “Some of it was forced on me and I learned from it later …”
Even as he grew up with basketball as his No. 1 love and football at No. 2, Baker explains how he had to learn to love baseball. He figured out that “baseball is a teacher … it teaches you to look past the disappointment of an hour ago or a day ago or a year ago. … You have to let it go …”
He embraced wearing the No. 12 for the Dodgers, as well as every team he played for and those five he served as a manager — it honors Dodgers outfielder Tommy Davis, wh0 Baker admired as he grew up in Riverside. That’s the number connected to him now as part of the franchise’s “Legends of Dodgers Baseball” as of August of 2024.
We thought about offering up 12 takeaways we had from his book, things that resonated most with us as we went cover-to-cover in this brave manuscript. We admired the time and thoughtfulness he put into with project, knowing he had a brilliant writing sherpa in sports journalist Steve Kettmann, co-director of the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods.
Instead we offer these six experiential joys and let you find your own without giving away too much:
Chapter 1, page 11: On the up-and-down relationship he had with his father, also his first baseball coach, but one who he learned so much from in how to forgive and move on:
My dad taught me … no one controls your own emotions but you, not unless you let them. My dad was one of the coolest dudes I ever met. … My dad explained something … that took years for me to understand, which was the difference between what he called outer dignity and inner dignity and the importance of knowing which was which. The outer dignity is what you’ll do to keep your job and feed your family. There has to be room for that to stretch a little sometimes. Your inner dignity is different. … (and) involves fixed points that cannot be moved. No man should intrude on your inner dignity. You can’t let that happen. … Along the way you have to learn for yourself what you will take and what you will not take. You must be more determined and have more character. You have to find a way to pull strength from some of the negatives. … I’ve always been taken care of when I guarded my inner dignity.
(Baker later explained that his father once told him that when you come to a crossroads, “take the road to the right.” “In other words,” Baker adds, “Do the right thing. Finding the right road, the right way, can be hard … Maybe we can find a way forward without breaking a lot of what was good about this country. Maybe then we might have a better chance of doing something about all the ways this country has fallen short. A man can hope.”)
Chapter 6, pages 120-121: A week after the Dodgers traded to get him from Atlanta, Baker injured his left knee in a pickup basketball game in Sacramento going in for a dunk. How could he save face?
I knew I screwed up big time. I never got hurt. Now my left knee was messed up .. I was trying to figure out how I was going to get out of this trouble … Spring training was coming up and I knew I wasn’t myself. I had lost what made me me. I had no balance. I didn’t have my speed … … Knowing it was all my fault was devastating. That was a big load to carry. It messed with my head, I ain’t gonna lie. … Bill Buhler, the Dodger trainer, asked how I’d injured my knee. ‘I hurt it running my dog,’ I told Mr. Bill. He gave me a look .. ‘Tell me the truth,’ he said. Mr. Bill said if I was straight with him, I could trust him not to sell me out to the Dodgers, so I told him what happened … (into the season I missed games) with a pulled hamstring … then a pulled groin … It was all connected … By August, I was on the bench … I would wait to the last minute to go up and pinch-hit because the boos from the fans at Dodger Stadium would be so loud. I didn’t want to hear it. This was where I had always wanted to play, for the Dodgers, and then I got my opportunity and blew it because I hurt myself playing basketball. But what could I do? Imagine the bad PR the Dodgers would have had .. I was miserable … People kept saying I was a bust .. That was when my strength really came in , the mental and spiritual strength my parents and family had helped build in me. Believe me, that year I needed all of it just to get through. … Some guy named Bud Tucker wrote a column in the Long Beach Press-Telegram calling me a ‘traditional basket case.’ I’d never even heard the expression before and it pissed me off big time. From then on I stopped reading the papers. Why should someone else’s words be given the power to control my own self-esteem … That winter the Dodgers dangled me as trade bait, offering me to the Chicago Cubs in a package to land Rick Monday. In the end, the Cubs preferred Bill Buckner, so the Dodgers traded him for Monday instead of me. I wasn’t even good as bait …
Chapter 7, page 154: Baker explains how after the Dodgers won the 1981 NLCS in a decisive game at Montreal, he was going to meet friends for a ride to the airport but as he and his wife, Harriet were with Derrel Thomas and his wife Liz and Ken Landreaux and his wife, when a group of “loud, drunk Canadian fans were” accosting Liz Thomas and a fight erupted.
We had ourselves a pretty good brawl there for awhile until the security people showed up.” As a result, Baker injured his right wrist. It led to an individual poor series against the Yankees in the World Series, but the Dodgers prevailed. Baker finished the season third in the NL with a .320 average to go with his first All-Star Game selection, wining a Gold Glove and Silver Slugger awards. In the 1981 World Series’ six games, he hit .167 with one RBI in 26 plate appearances, striking out six times. He did have one key sacrifice fly.
Baseball is a wicked teacher. I felt like Moses, who couldn’t go to the Promised Land, but I had helped my team get there. If it’s all about the team and the team wins the World Series, then that’s more important about how you performed individually. That was another crossroads, to accept that my best moment as a player was also, in the end, one of my lesser moments as a player. My wrist was never the same after that … I’ve had three hand operations over the years and to this day I still get trigger finger in that hand.
Chapter 8, page 166 to 171: After Baker hit .357 in the four-game NLCS loss to Philadelphia, the Dodgers were talking about trading or releasing him, following surgery to his right knee, even with an $800,000 salary left to pay him.
Maybe I loved being a Dodger too much, or maybe I couldn’t quite believe the team had really turned on me .. But I just wasn’t ready … It was then … that rumors about me picked up. What was going on? It had to do with drugs. I had smoked weed and tried mescaline one time in Mexico .. Similar deal with cocaine, which was everywhere in those days. Almost anywhere in America at that time in the early 1980s, in whatever scene you were into, there was cocaine around … As a guy who had heart issues going back to high school, it just wasn’t worth the risk. But someone was pushing rumors about me … All the joy I’d felt as a Dodger, all my years of loving my teammates and my team and my community had come to being shown the door with rumors flying …
In 2024, I was in L.A. being honored as a former Dodgers and I saw (Peter) O’Malley. We started talking and he apologized. ‘Dusty, I’m sorry that I listened to what some people were saying to me about you back then,’ he told me. I thanked him and it helped me put that painful period behind me.
Chapter 11, pages 243-245: Baker understands the roots of how someone can become despondent enough and end up living on the streets, based on the spiral of his brother Vic, guilt-ridden over a failed financial business he set up with Baker that ended up sending Baker into IRS debt:
Vic felt crippling guilt … I learned then that guilt is the worst of all emotions — it takes a life on its own and can do serious harm … Vic was always wresting with the Devil. He was possessed by the adversary. I had heard about that. But I saw it first-hand in my own brother.
My nightmare with the IRS was another crossroads in my life, one that came with a lot of pain and took a lot of years to navigate. You learn about yourself along the way. You learn there are some things you can’t do alone. You’ll find friends who will step up to help you, but first you have to be able to accept that help. People need to know you’re open to humbling yourself in that way …
Chapter 12, page 280: On going to the mound for a manager’s visit during Game 6 of the 2002 World Series against the Angels, removing San Francisco pitcher Russ Ortiz in the seventh inning, and handing the game ball as Ortiz left to the dugout:
Everybody thought I gave him the ball because I thought the game was over. People say that’s how it looked. To me, that makes no sense. You don’t make it one year in baseball, let along 34 years, without learning: Man, the game ain’t ever over till it’s over. I was not counting any chickens … We still had to get eight more outs and even a 5-0 lead could evaporate in a hurry against a team like the Angels. I gave that ball to Russ because he had given heart and soul to pitch his ass off for us that night.
The one weird part of that was that I did end up kind of jinxing (relief pitcher Felix Rodriguez), or messing him up, which I only came to understand later. Guys have their own ways of getting mentally ready, and they all have their own routines, some of them very elaborate. Felix had a routine where whenever he came into a game, he would take the ball from the manager and fling the ball into the dugout. Then he got a new ball from the umpire. The ritual would get all the funk off the ball and he would start fresh … That night in Anaheim for Game 6 of the World Series, he had to ask for a new ball right away, and couldn’t throw one to the dugout the way he usually did. It may or may not have thrown him off, but it’s the kind of thing that’s important to players.
(To follow: Rodriguez came into face Angels’ left-handed hitter Scott Spezio. After going up 1-2, Rodriguez had a full count to Spezio, who then took a fastball now and inside and hit it into the lower seats down the right-field line for a three-run homer. Eventually Troy Glaus had a two-run double to give the Angels the come-from-behind win, on to winning Game 7 the next night and the title).
How it goes in the scorebook:
A high five, scalding hot.
In Baker’s epilogue, he explains that “I’ve drawn lines I won’t go past” in telling his life story. “Some people may have wanted to hear more about intimate conversations with my players or coaches or scenes in the private sanctuary of the clubhouse or dugout, but there are sacred places in baseball that need to be respected. Some things need to remain private, out of respect. This is my life and I’ve opened the door on as much of it as I can.”
Messages received. And privacy respected. But with that in mind, so many more interactions, inter-thoughts and processes that lead to decisions are laid out. You won’t miss not having those other things.
If you’ve been in or around baseball the last 40 years, you’ll rarely find anyone with a resentful, jealous or derogatory thing to say about Baker. If there remain any innuendo or assumptions about how he handled his business, they are cleared up here.
It’s also a reminder: Revisit Scott Miller’s spring 2025 book, “Skipper: Why Baseball Managers Matter and Always Will,” and Jane Leavy’s September 2025 book, “Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong with Baseball and How to Fix it.” Both Miller and Leavy recruited insight from Baker, an example of not just what made him a quality manager in the modern game but why.
Baker is a first-class truth-teller, a down-to-earth confidant for many he still keeps in contact with. And more than anything else, he knows how to laugh.
If we look at the last line in Baker’s current Society of American Baseball Research bio, last revised in December of 2022 after Baker led the Houston Astros to a title, it reads: “Although Baker is by no means finished, the 2022 World Series championship may be viewed as the capstone on his career. Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson remarked, ‘I’m happy that he’s now going to get his due. He’s going to get some pats on the back and cross that bridge to get elected to the Hall of Fame.’ Indeed, of the top 10 winningest managers in big-league history, Baker is the only one not yet enshrined.”
If this manuscript that reflects more genuinely on why he deserves to be in the Baseball Hall of Fame for his managerial career, overlapping with his playing career, to celebrate his entire baseball life, even better in the high-five department.
More to followup:
== Steve Kettmann assisted Baker framing his words and memories for this project, gaining from the relationship they cooked up for a really cool project in 2015 titled, “Kiss The Sky: My Weekend in Monterey at the Greatest Concert Ever.”
Kettmann says in a Q&A with AwfulAnnouncing.com about the process involved of this project: “It’s Dusty’s book, written by Dusty Baker. I helped him write it. I’ve ghostwritten books. Being a ghostwriter is different. With Jose Canseco, we did a book called Juiced about steroids, and that one was ghostwritten, where you’re telling the story but not working together in a collaborative way like Dusty and I did. It’s just different. It’s a greater degree of involvement and really thinking through all the elements of storytelling. … (the biggest challenge was) stamina. The book is 162,000 words. My first book, One Day at Fenway, was probably about 81,000 words. I think Juiced was about 80,000 words. Baseball Maverick, about Sandy Alderson, was about 100,000 words. In general, books are getting shorter, and our publisher definitely didn’t want us to go over 100,000 words. This book is like a double album. It’s not just writing. It takes longer to develop chapters, edit, and review. Dusty and I both got pretty exhausted, to be honest. You want to maintain attention to detail, accuracy, and thinking things through.”
Kettmann adds in a piece he wrote for the Santa Cruz alternative weekly Good Times to get the word out about his appearance with Baker at Bookshop Santa Cruz on Monday, June 8, Baker’s first event for the book:
“He’s California through and through, in a lot of different ways. When it came time to pick a voice actor to do the audio version of his book Crossroads, he commented to me that they ought to pick someone with a California accent. A lot of East Coast people don’t even know what we mean when we talk about a California accent, because it’s a way of speaking that tries to connect people, not make them feel excluded. …”
== Baker’s piece for The Players’ Tribune in 2024 called “A Baseball Life” may have helped lay the groundwork for some of the chapters/thoughts he brought forth in “Crossroads.”
== USA Today’s Bob Nightengale, as he often is, landed this story on Baker in early April to set he table for the book’s release — and reveal a story about Baker included in the book about his duty to work with the homeless.
== From The New Yorker’s Charles Bethea: “Baker likes hanging out. He calls it a ‘lost art.’ He suggested hanging out in the Sacramento sun. … He motioned toward two stone turtles (‘sign of long life’) and a pool fed by a waterfall made from rocks delivered to him, he explained, by ‘some hippies who said the rocks whispered to them.’ … He arrived at a chunk of Sierra gray granite, about four feet tall. Benches surrounded it. ‘This is my Dobie Gillis Think Rock,’ Baker explained. ‘Dobie was this dude that was a beatnik in this sitcom when I was a kid. That was before the hippies.’ In the credits, Dobie posed by Rodin’s ‘The Thinker.’ ‘I put it here when I built my house,’ Baker said. ‘It changes colors with the sun. It changes with the rain.’ He touched the warm rock. ‘Dude, that’s what it’s about,’ he said. ‘Energy.'”
== From The New York Times’s Daniel Brown: “What makes this (tour of his house) — and “Crossroads”— so much damn fun is that Baker has a personal connection to nearly every face hanging in this 9,000-square-foot home. Some people name-drop. Baker name-storms. And for every photo we stop to admire, the manager supplies a backstory like a kindly museum docent. It can get weird in here. Baker’s collection feels like a cross between the Immaculate Grid and “Hollywood Squares.” One of his display cases features a signed baseball from singer Chris Isaak next to one from former Giants infielder Hal Lanier next to one from model Cindy Crawford next to one from boxer Joe Frazier to … wait, how do you know “Magnum P.I.?”
== From The San Francisco Chronicles’ Ann Killion: “Baker always knew he had a story to tell. ‘But if I was going to do it, I was only going to do it when I was done,’ Baker said over a recent lunch near Oracle Park. ‘People can hold grudges if you tell your version of the truth.’ It’s hard to find a person with a grudge toward Baker, one of the most beloved people in all of sports. Spend a few hours with him and it seems that everyone knows him — the cooks in the kitchen, the parking attendants, the folks on the street — and feels a personal connection.”
== In late May, ’26, Baker appeared at an event in his hometown of Sacramento to promote the idea that the city was ready to have its own Major League Baseball team — considering it has baby-sat the Athletics between their departure from Oakland and waiting for Las Vegas to have a new home for them. “They had balloons, baseball caps and a splashy video,” wrote the Los Angeles Times’ Bill Shakin. “They even had Dusty Baker, because any day with Dusty Baker is a good day. And, as a campaign called ‘The Sacramento Pitch’ unveiled its plan to lure a Major League Baseball expansion team to the state capital … (the city) unveiled a $4-billion proposal to land a team, build a riverfront ballpark and surround it with an entertainment district. …
“Baker celebrated the dozens of major leaguers who have come out of Sacramento. ‘We had some of the baddest dudes in baseball — not only in Sacramento, but in baseball. We were proud of that,’ Baker said. “If you weren’t hitting — if you were hitting now like some of these guys are hitting now, .217 — man, we’d talk about you. Because, if you were from Sacramento, you gotta ball’.”
== Ever see Baker in this former NBC day-time game show called “Just Men,” hosted by Betty White? It lasted just a couple months in 1983. The manliness of it wasn’t easy to watch with women contestants competing against each other. The Washington Post’s Tom Shales review called it “the litmus test for people who think the TV show that can make them physically ill hasn’t been invented.”
== Our inclusion of Baker in our SoCal Sports History 101 series for the post dedicated to No. 12.
== Here’s a secret hack we’ve discovered lately for the New York Times’ Wordl puzzle: Consider plugging in Dusty or Baker as the five-letter word to start a game, as your wit determines. He is one of the few people whose first and last name fits this daily exercise.
Of course, this only occurred to us on May 19, when “Dusty” was the actual answer — and we were immersed in a review copy of the book.
So on May 20, we ended using both names — and it helped solve the puzzle in three:
A repeat on the next day — and we solved it in two. Now do you agree with this premise?
Tom Hoffarth's The Drill: More Farther Off the Wall 