David Huzzard: Dusty Baker is better than some think

My opinion on Dusty Baker started to change sometime before the Nationals hired him. His name came up often whenever a job opened up and he was mentioned often by broadcasters when Matt Williams was the manager of the Nats. My thought on Baker started to be why is a manager that has done nothing but win in his career so disliked by a certain segment of fans? I've read "The Book" and "Moneyball" and I visit FanGraphs.com on a near daily basis, but at some point when the results are so different than what you think they should be, you have to get back to the essence of why advanced stats exist, give up the dogma and ask the question why.

Baker remains disliked by many baseball smarks, to steal a term from pro wrestling. To those that don't know, in pro-wrestling terms, a smark is a smart mark. It's the wrestling fan that follows all that is going on backstage to the extent that they can, and that is where the problem lies. Smarks complain about who's getting booked over whom based on half truths and rumors they read in a dirt sheet or on the internet. A lot of the smarter baseball fans have stopped being smart and become smarks. They recite advanced stats like a prayer to Odin lacking a full understanding of why those stats exist or what they really say or if the apply in this situation.

Baker has had eight losing seasons in his 22 year career. The only managers with more wins than him that aren't in the Hall of Fame are Gene Mauch, Lou Piniella and Bruce Bochy. Dusty Baker's .531 winning percentage sits comfortably between Hall of Famers Whitey Herzog and Tommy Lasorda. By all measures of winning. Baker has done a lot of it in his career, and yet to many he remains a joke. A manager that wins in spite of himself and not because of his decisions in the dugout or more importantly the clubhouse.

Advanced stats are good, thinking outside the traditional box for managerial tactical decisions is also good, but dogma is bad. As much as baseball isn't about selling jeans it's also not about sells mathematics textbooks. Baseball is a game played by men and managed by men and controlled by time. The reason baseball isn't mathematics or an exact science is that every event that occurs in the game is the only time that event will occur. Certainly players will bat with two on and two out more than once in their careers, but the pitchers, the weather, the stadium, the temperature, the angle of the sun, the brightness of the lights, the wind direction, the length of the grass will all change. No event can occur for a second time, and that makes baseball always a case study and never an exact science.

Baker is widely criticized by a group of fans that demand certainty and believe advanced stats give it to them when advanced stats only explain uncertain happenings better than traditional stats. Advanced stats exist because someone asked a question of why and sought understanding. Baker has been so good in his career. His numbers are borderline Hall of Fame worthy and winning with half his lineup on the disabled list has been miraculous. If he can manage to win any games with half the rotation missing at the same time, it will be an even bigger miracle.

Baker may no put out the lineup the stats say he should, he may not manage the bullpen according to the best matchups or pull pitchers when modern day conventional wisdom says he should. But he has been a winning manager for his entire career, and perhaps it is time to stop looking into the mirror darkly and ask the important question of why. If Baker was really as bad as something, then he'd be nowhere near as good as he's been. When the results don't match your preferred process, at some point you have to examine the other process and realize perhaps you're wrong or your preferred method doesn't provide all the answers you thought it did.

David Huzzard blogs about the Nationals at Citizens of Natstown. Follow him on Twitter: @DavidHuzzard. His views appear here as part of MASNsports.com's season-long initiative of welcoming guest bloggers to our pages. All opinions expressed are those of the guest bloggers, who are not employed by MASNsports.com but are just as passionate about their baseball as our regular roster of writers.