{"id":141002,"date":"2026-05-27T17:40:54","date_gmt":"2026-05-27T20:40:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ubirataonline.com.br\/dusty-bakers-crossroads-comes-to-santa-cruz\/"},"modified":"2026-05-27T17:40:58","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T20:40:58","slug":"dusty-bakers-crossroads-comes-to-santa-cruz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ubirataonline.com.br\/en\/dusty-bakers-crossroads-comes-to-santa-cruz\/","title":{"rendered":"Dusty Baker\u2019s \u2018Crossroads\u2019 Comes to Santa Cruz"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It was right here, along the edge of Monterey Bay, that likely future Hall of Fame baseball manager Dusty Baker had the awakening of a lifetime to celebrate his 18th birthday: It was June 1967, radios all over America were filled with songs telling young people to come to California for something they were calling \u201cthe Summer of Love,\u201d and Dusty\u2019s mom bought him two tickets to the Monterey Pop Festival as a birthday present. <\/p>\n
She even lent Dusty the family AMC Rambler Classic to drive down from Sacramento with a friend, and when they fixed a flat tire and made it down that last slope of Highway 17 and steered onto Highway 1 through Santa Cruz, a boy becoming a man felt an elation that defined who he was for a lifetime. The smell of the Pacific Ocean was like the smell of wide-open possibility.<\/p>\n
For Northern California sports fans, Dusty Baker would become a beloved figure as a San Francisco Giants manager from 1993 to 2002. He represented many of the best qualities we saw in ourselves, and it was that weekend along the shores of Monterey Bay that helped cement this unique blend of qualities. <\/p>\n
He would go on to a 19-year career as a player, mostly in Atlanta and L.A., a star and a clutch performer\u2014MVP of the 1977 National League Championship Series\u2014known above all for the intense work ethic he learned from his mentor Hank Aaron and for the infectious joy he took in being in the moment and bringing people together, an essential aspect of his character that had everything to do with the mix of joyous people he saw along Monterey Bay the weekend he turned 18.<\/p>\n
There was more to life, always more, and a brave and open soul could live it and help others live it as well. Life was like the greatest concert you could ever catch, full of opportunities to feel and see more, like at the Monterey County Fairgrounds when Jimi Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane and Country Joe and the Fish played alongside Baker family favorites like Lou Rawls. It was a mind-blowing caravan of more than 30 musical acts.<\/p>\nBOOK HIM<\/strong>\u00a0 Dusty Baker\u2019s new book, with a photo by Michael Zagaris, who at 81, is still shooting San Francisco 49ers games as the team photographer. PHOTO: Michael Zagaris<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u201cSeeing all of them was as much fun as I\u2019d ever had in my life,\u201d Dusty writes in his new book, Crossroads: A Memoir in Baseball and Life<\/em> (Crown), which I helped him write, launching with a Bookshop Santa Cruz appearance on Monday, June 8\u2014along with me\u2014Dusty\u2019s first event for the book. \u201cA lot of musicians I\u2019d never heard before that weekend turned into some of my favorites for years to come, none more so than Jimi Hendrix, whose intense guitar playing both frightened and attracted me to his music all at once. Hendrix was cool. When he set his guitar on fire during his Monterey set, we all knew we\u2019d seen something that changed our lives.\u201d<\/p>\n
Back in 2015, Dusty and I worked on a little book, Kiss the Sky: My Weekend in Monterey for the Greatest Rock Concert Ever, <\/em>which I published through Wellstone Books, earning national coverage, including an article in The New Yorker<\/em> magazine. (People seemed mostly interested to hear that Dusty once shared a joint with Jimi Hendrix\u2014true story\u2014and that he helped invent the high five.)<\/p>\n
At the time, Dusty was still a big-league manager, or trying to be\u2014and Dusty and I launched that book with a Bookshop Santa Cruz event, then went for a short stroll down Pacific Avenue and watched Game 2 of that year\u2019s World Series in a corner table at Kianti\u2019s Pizza & Pasta Bar. I had to red-eye it to the Series that night, to report on the Mets for my book Baseball Maverick<\/em>, all about former Oakland A\u2019s general manager Sandy Alderson, by then with the Mets.<\/p>\n
Dusty stayed behind in the Zen Suite of the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods writers retreat center that we run in Soquel and had another important life experience. He was up for the vacant Washington Nationals managing job and thought he had a very good chance. <\/p>\n
Dusty\u2019s wife Melissa called him in the Zen Suite to tell him ESPN was reporting that the job was actually going to former Giants pitcher Bud Black. Dusty thought his life in baseball was probably over. It was a different version of confronting his own mortality.<\/p>\n
Dusty had been right the first time. The Nationals soon hired him. Following his introductory press conference, Chelsea Janes described his whirlwind week in the Washington Post<\/em>:<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u201cA week before he was introduced as the Washington Nationals\u2019 new manager, pirouetting in a gleaming white No. 12 jersey, Dusty Baker was at a wellness center in the mountains of Northern California, wondering what went wrong. Authors bunker themselves there to escape, to pull novels out of the quiet. Baker, who was touring in Santa Cruz for his own recently published book, \u2018Kiss the Sky<\/em>,\u2019 sat there disappointed.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is how Dusty describes that Santa Cruz experience in Crossroads<\/em>: \u201cI had one of those moments where life reaches out and awakens you. I took a little walk on the property, four miles up from the Pacific, breathing in that redwood smell I love, and all of a sudden I heard the beautiful sound of music. Was this in my mind? Or real? That was definitely a real saxophone somebody was playing. I could hear it echoing up out of the small canyon I was looking into. I could still hear the music.\u201d<\/p>\n
The stories about Dusty in Santa Cruz speak to a deeper truth about the man: He\u2019s 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<\/em>, he commented to me that they ought to pick someone with a California accent. A lot of East Coast people don\u2019t even know what we mean when we talk about a California accent, because it\u2019s a way of speaking that tries to connect people, not make them feel excluded.<\/p>\n
Dusty was born in Riverside, California, and grew up in a mixed community where Blacks and Latinos and whites all hung out and didn\u2019t think much about race or differences. Then, when he was 16, the family moved north to Sacramento and at his new school Dusty soon found he was one of two Blacks in the whole school\u2014the other being his brother, Rob.<\/p>\n
Dusty would go on to a lot of hard lessons along the way, crossroads in life where he could either just mope and put his head down or he could stay alert and hold out hope that something that at first looked like a setback might in the end prove a blessing. To an older generation of sports fans, it was well known that Dusty was in the on-deck circle in April 1974 when his Atlanta Braves teammate Hank Aaron hit the 715th<\/sup> home run of his career, famously breaking Babe Ruth\u2019s iconic lifetime home run record. What was amazing was that Dusty ended up with the Braves in the first place and had Hank adopt him as almost a son.<\/p>\n
A week before the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, Dusty kneeled next to his bed at the family home near Sacramento and prayed: \u201cPlease, God, not the South!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0It was the day before baseball\u2019s amateur draft, and Dusty didn\u2019t even want to play baseball. Basketball was the sport he loved. And football. He had scholarship offers in both sports and wanted to be a big man on campus and have himself a good time, even as he was getting an education to prepare for his future, the way his mom and dad had raised him. <\/p>\n
But then his parents divorced, and he felt that, as the oldest, he needed to bring in money for the family. So he opted for the baseball draft\u2014and was selected by the Atlanta Braves, a team in the South, where in the 1960s the racism of the Jim Crow era was very much alive. Dusty\u2019s dad was dead-set against him signing. He wanted him in college. But Dusty and his mom flew to L.A. to practice with the Braves at Dodger Stadium.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn the bus ride back to the hotel, I sat next to Hank Aaron,\u201d Dusty writes in Crossroads<\/em>. \u201cI was raised to respect my elders and wait until they talked to me before I talked to them. I kept my mouth shut. It wasn\u2019t like we were shooting the breeze. How much does a kid talk to Hank Aaron? He asked me some questions about our family.<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2019Are you going to sign?\u2019 he asked me.<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2019Mr. Aaron, I don\u2019t know,\u201d I said. \u201cIt\u2019s a big decision.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHe gave me a long look. He had seen me work out with the team and sized me up as a ballplayer, and now he was sizing me up as a young man. He gave me the advice of a fellow ballplayer.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2019If you have enough confidence that you\u2019ll be in the big leagues by the time your college class graduates, then go ahead and sign,\u2019 he told me. \u2018If not, then you go to school.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
That was the beginning of countless lessons Aaron, as consummate a student of the art of paying close attention as baseball has ever seen, would pass on to Dusty \u2013 but the biggest lessons taught were about remembering advice you\u2019re given so you can try to apply it later\u2014and then, after careful preparation and study, learning to trust your feelings, even up at the plate trying to hit a big-league fastball or big-league curve.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you don\u2019t trust your feelings, you can never be a great hitter,\u201d Dusty writes in Crossroads<\/em>. \u201cIf you feel it, it\u2019s probably true. That was what Hank taught us. If something tells you that the pitcher is going to throw you an outside fastball, he\u2019s probably going to throw you an outside fastball. If you have a feeling you want to take a pitch, take a pitch. If Hank took a pitch, he always had a reason, whether it was to see the movement or the late break or whatever.\u201d<\/p>\n
I worked with Dusty on the book closely and talked through everything with him. Now that the book is about to be published, I think Dusty\u2019s advice about trusting your feelings is more relevant in our culture than ever. I go out in public and I see so many people rattled by life, plagued by our times, seeking more to cocoon themselves away from the world than to be engaged and let themselves feel what they are feeling. I get it.<\/p>\n
\u00a0Hey, I know the feeling, and maybe it\u2019s my turn for the corner spot on the sofa when my wife and my daughters and I watch \u201cTop Chef\u201d together on the screen and I can just unplug a little. But it\u2019s good to be out in the world. Dusty has talked for years about the art of hanging, just hanging out, with no particular agenda, and checking out places on the road with no online review, just your gut feeling about a place when you walk in the door. Or people you meet. You trust your feelings. In Dusty\u2019s world, that means you stay open to them as long as you can, and look for the best in them.<\/p>\nVICTORY<\/strong> Baker led the Houston Astros to a World Series victory in 2022.PHOTO: Courtesy of the Houston Astros<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u201cTrust your feelings,\u201d he writes in Crossroads<\/em>. \u201cSome people reading those words might think I\u2019m talking about a hunch. Or an inkling. Those are words people use when they don\u2019t trust their feelings. An honest feeling is much deeper than a hunch or inkling. Feelings are powerful. Feelings are true. Feelings sometimes can\u2019t be explained. They come from the inside, but it\u2019s an external power that gives you that feeling in the first place. It\u2019s similar to when you sense danger. You can\u2019t explain why, it just happens. And it happens for a reason. And how often do you have that sense of danger and look back later, glad that you did? Until you reach that point of trusting your feelings, you\u2019ll find you\u2019re second-guessing yourself. As we get older, sometimes we lose that. As we get older, we want factual findings. Children tend to trust their feelings more than we do. They\u2019re sometimes better at knowing what they know.\u201d<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re in Santa Cruz on June 8, come on by and hear Dusty talk about trusting his feelings, before or after we talk about what it was like managing Barry Bonds (or holding him as a baby, the day he was born), possibly Russ Ortiz and the game ball, Dusty\u2019s favorite big-league city outside of California (hint: someone is trying to build a massive triumphal arch there), or about his many musician friends over the years, from John Lee Hooker to Elvin Bishop.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll just say this about Dusty. I\u2019ve known him since the 1990s, I\u2019ve worked with him on different projects, and he\u2019s the rare person who always makes me want to be a better person myself, just by his example.<\/p>\n
\u00a0Just to go through a day with him, stopping in at Starbucks and saying hello to different people on the way to order, then stopping by a donut shop to pick up some donuts for the receptionists at the building where Dusty has his office, then handing off the donuts on the way in, at every moment Dusty always seems to have a little extra for people, a little extra friendliness, a little extra alertness, a little extra of himself.<\/p>\n
I try to be the same way, but as my wife will tell you, I can do better in treating everyone I encounter over the course of the day with an open heart. We can all search for a little more grace in ourselves, and I know Dusty puts a lot into his own search to do the right thing.<\/p>\n
Dusty Baker represents a bridge back to an earlier era of baseball loaded with personalities such as Satchel Paige\u2014as a rookie on the Braves, Dusty used to carry Satch\u2019s fishing poles for him\u2014and Orlando Cepeda and Willie Mays. Dusty learned from all of them. In that era, you formed bonds that lasted a lifetime, and that was a tradition Dusty passed on, going out of his way as a veteran on the Dodgers to befriend young players like Ron Washington, the future big-league manager and current Giants coach.<\/p>\n
Dusty hasn\u2019t yet made the Baseball Hall of Fame, although he is expected to. However, in 2025 he was inducted into the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum\u2019s Hall of Game:<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been around Dusty enough to know he always seems to have time for a call with a friend in need. More than any baseball stories, more than winning the World Series as a player with the Dodgers in 1981 and as a manager with the Astros in 2022, it is Dusty\u2019s belief in his fellow man that I find inspiring, and that makes his story so worthy of study.<\/p>\n
Out on San Francisco Bay fishing one time in 1999 with his friend Tom Stienstra, the longtime outdoors columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle <\/em>and then the Examiner<\/em>, Dusty told Tom: \u201cBack on the Braves, Luke Appling took me aside and told me, \u2018To be lucky, you\u2019ve got to think lucky,\u2019\u201d Dusty explains in his book. \u201cThat goes for anything. If you don\u2019t think lucky in fishing, you don\u2019t catch any fish. Am I lucky? It\u2019s true, I\u2019m lucky. If you think you\u2019re lucky, that\u2019s what you get. My son Darren is the perfect example: He always catches fish because he always thinks lucky.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Stienstra was going through multiple surgeries for brain cancer at Stanford University Hospital, Dusty was managing the Astros, but found a way to call Stienstra before every surgery to wish him well.<\/p>\n
\u201cI told Dusty how, for years, I had prayed for others, but never for myself, and that I had been given so much in my life, I felt humbled to ask for more,\u201d Stienstra writes in his new book Heaven Delayed: One Man\u2019s Survival of Sixteen Near-Death Encounters<\/em> (Wellstone Books, 2026). \u201cI wondered, I told him, how I was still alive when others had passed. Dusty, who also had his life saved in a cancer surgery at Stanford, identified with these impressions.\u201d<\/p>\n
The conversation continued.<\/p>\n
\u201cI, too, wondered for a long time why my life had been spared,\u201d Dusty said. \u201cYou probably are going through the same thing. I\u2019ve gotten to the point now that I believe we have been saved because there is more for us to do. We\u2019re still alive to do it. Keep your goal in your mind, body and soul. Keep living and enjoying every moment.\u201d<\/p>\n
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