We got an anonymous email referencing a short article in ESPN Magazine from July 12 2002 titled “Prior Restraint” that we were told would contradict the quotes that Dusty Baker made about Mark Prior at his news conference. Seemed a little “cloak and dagger”. What does that have to do with the Nats?
Reading this ESPN article was like a Back To The Future lesson where you know the ending of the story. The article was very insightful on how you want to handle a young arm like Mark Prior. Written right after Don Baylor was fired by the Cubs and before Jim Hendry even thought of hiring Dusty Baker who was the Giants manager at the time, this article was ahead of it’s time in 2002.
When we first mentioned Dusty Baker was a finalist on October 23rd, the comments on our pages were lukewarm if the Nats hired Baker mostly based on reputation, and many reputations are fair and many when they are negative are not.
This was the typical story on the ‘negative’ that followed Dusty Baker around like this one from 5 years ago in Bleacher Report: http://bleacherreport.com/articles/367793-got-young-pitching-keep-it-away-from-dusty-baker Articles on Dusty rarely talked about his successes taking failing teams to the playoffs or how former players showered Dusty with positives, rather they focused on the negatives.
To digress, every day we get a traffic report from a software add-on called Jetpack and it tells us how people find us, where they are geographically, what they read, etc. On search engines, people actually typed these words and phrases (insert pic) and found us through Google, Bing, Yahoo, AOL, etc.
“Was dusty baker wrongly convicted for baseball deaths of kerry wood, mark prior?” was exactly how one person searched and found our site even though we never used those exact words. Inquiring minds wanted to know and Dusty answered a similar question after his Press Conference on Thursday and appears Dusty was probably “wrongly convicted” in the world of public opinion that operate on deep emotion. Dusty needed to answer his critics as this “ruining arms” label has followed Dusty for more than a decade or as the person more specifically typed in “baseball deaths”.
As we referenced above to this Back To The Future stuff in ESPN Magazine in July 2002, the article was written by a young writer Andy Latack who is now a lawyer. Latack referred to future ace Mark Prior:
“…Baylor got used to the boos before he got canned. “This kid is going to be a franchise pitcher very soon,” Baylor said. “So to ruin his arm by having him throw 140 pitches? Even if I’m gone, that’s something I don’t want on my resumé.”
