The baseball legend Dusty Baker, who once wanted to be a journalist, has always had a knack for being in the right place at the right time. Age nineteen: Baker spots Jimi Hendrix on the streets of San Francisco, and the two share a joint. In his twenties: stands in the batter’s box as his Atlanta Braves teammate Hank Aaron hits his seven-hundred-and-fifteenth homer. Thirties: takes cover in Candlestick Park when the World Series earthquake strikes. Fifties: manages Barry Bonds when Bonds hits his seventy-third single-season homer. Sixties: manages Max Scherzer when Scherzer throws twenty strikeouts in an outing. Not that Baker merely beheld greatness. In 2022, four decades after winning the World Series as a Dodger outfielder, Baker, at seventy-three, became the oldest manager to win it. The toothpick he chewed that day in the Astros dugout is now in Cooperstown, and Baker may soon follow.

His citation in the National Baseball Hall of Fame would likely mention another accomplishment—co-inventing the high five with Glenn Burke—which Baker plays down in “Crossroads,” his new memoir. “I just reached my hand up and hit his hand,” Baker writes. “I just reacted to Glenn.” Burke, a Dodgers teammate, had provided the setup for the pioneering hand slap, a spontaneous response to a homer that Baker hit in 1977.

“It just seemed like the natural thing to do,” Baker added, the other day, during a conversation at his Spanish Revival house, near Sacramento, California. His mustache is graying, but his eyes remain mischievous. He had the Knicks-Cavs series on TV, next to a wall lined with guitars signed by John Lee Hooker, Carlos Santana, B. B. King, Tom Petty, Buddy Guy, and, he said, “Elvin Bishop, my fishing partner.” Takeout from Visconti’s Ristorante waited on the counter. Baker sprawled across a leather couch. Basketball is his favorite game to play and watch, and he was rooting for the Knicks—mostly because their coach, Mike Brown, once coached the Sacramento Kings. “I’m more amazed by basketball,” Baker said, comparing it with baseball. “The best athletes play basketball and football now. But, come on, you telling me Nikola Jokić couldn’t be a pitcher? Allen Iverson couldn’t play shortstop? It’s, like, Dude!”

The last time Baker managed a pro club was in 2023, with Houston. But he surmised that he would return to the dugout—“if I could manage half the games for all the salary.” He always managed more by feel than by analytics. “You spend enough time hanging out around baseball, you feel the game,” he said.

“I had a horrible dream that you read all the good books and read me the boring books just to put me to sleep.”

Cartoon by P. C. Vey

Baker likes hanging out. He calls it a “lost art.” He suggested hanging out in the Sacramento sun. Walking outside, he passed his pointers, Gracie and Rylie, barking in a pen. Nearby was a freshly dug mole hole. “Fucker,” Baker said, of the pest. “I gotta put some smoke bombs out here tomorrow.” 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.”

There was also a rose garden dedicated to his father, plum trees, boxes planted with onions, a few rows of Syrah grapes, and seats plucked from five baseball stadiums sitting beside a batting cage used by his son, Darren, a second baseman in the minors. 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. There are points on earth I’ve found that are points of energy—Mexico, Venezuela, Hawaii, Montana.” In the memoir, Baker notes that he once tried mescaline and hated it. He once tried mushrooms as well (“you laugh a lot”) and uses weed on occasion, although he said that he’ll never try gummies again. “One gummy wasn’t doing nothing, so I took another,” he recalled. “I was out of control.”

Hanging out, as Baker defines it, means that “you don’t have any time or place. You’re just kind of there, wherever you are.” He lingered with his hand on his think rock. “It’s like Satchel Paige said, ‘Sometimes I sits and thinks, and sometimes I just sits.’ ” Paige, an early mentor to Baker, always called him Daffy. Baker never knew exactly why. He ambled off toward some plum trees, stooping to pull a few weeds. He plucked a plum from a branch and took a bite. “Almost there,” he said. ♦