Prometheus 6   

On Race, Baker Swings With Grace
By Joan Walsh

SAN FRANCISCO � Six years ago, I wrote an homage to Dusty Baker that hailed his approach to race as a key to his success in leading the middling San Francisco Giants to the National League West title that year, over the Los Angeles Dodgers. Headlined "Dusty's way," the article quoted Giant team members praising Baker's unrivaled ability to take players and coaches from all over the world and turn them into a first-place team by talking about race, not hiding from it.

Now Baker, the Chicago Cubs' manager, is in danger of becoming the poster boy for "reverse racism," thanks to a pregame riff with beat writers about whether warm-weather baseball is tougher on whites. "It's easier for most Latin guys and it's easier for most minority people because most of us come from heat," Baker said earlier this month. "You don't find too many brothers in New Hampshire and Maine and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan We were brought over here for the heat, right? Isn't that history? Weren't we brought over because we could take the heat?"

The reaction to Baker's comments burned up sports-talk radio phone lines for a day, then the wildfire spread to the studios of right-wing demagogues on cable television and radio. Rush Limbaugh called Baker a "disciple" of Leonard Jeffries, the notorious City College of New York professor known for crackpot theories about "ice people" and "sun people." Fox's Sean Hannity said that because a white manager would have been fired for Baker's remarks � a debatable point � Baker must be punished.

I've known Baker professionally for 11 years, and as usual, the right-wing broadcast bully-boys are dead wrong. But the issue may be with us for a while: Baker will attract international attention at Tuesday's All-Star game as National League manager. So his views on race could be a story for a while � but let's get it straight. If Baker's going to become famous as a race relations symbol, it should be as a role model, not a pariah.

Baker is to the multiracial world of baseball what Bill Clinton was to the splintered, disabled Democratic Party: He does the impossible every day; he makes sure fractious rivals get along; he shows us how it's supposed to work. One of four African American managers, he speaks fluent Spanish and still hangs out with his white high school "homeboys" from Sacramento. He's married to a native San Franciscan of Filipino descent. He put together multiracial management teams, first in San Francisco, now in Chicago � reuniting this year with bench coach Dick Pole, who's white, and third base coach Wendell Kim, the only Asian field coach in major league baseball, who worked for Baker years ago in San Francisco. He brought with him to Chicago black and Latino coaches from the Giants. "If you can't find somebody on my staff you can talk to, you're not trying," he told me when I asked him in 1997 about his racially diverse management staff.