Sactown Magazine The Heart of a Giant When it comes to baseball, Dusty Baker plays to win. He's also living proof that the most important stats aren't measured in hits and runs, but in heart and soul. April 28, 2021
Without a second opinion, Dusty Baker might never have been the star athlete who morphed into one of baseball’s winningest managers. As a teenager in 1966, a benign heart murmur was misdiagnosed as a significantly more serious condition. He was told to quit all strenuous activities—particularly football, which he loved. “They told me I’d never play sports again. I was 16,” Baker says, sitting in the empty tasting room—closed due to the pandemic—of his West Sacramento winery, Baker Family Wines, in early January. His family had just moved to Carmichael from Riverside after his dad landed a job at McClellan Air Force Base, and he’d already made an impression as a touchdown maker at Del Campo High School in Fair Oaks. But his father, Johnnie B. Baker Sr. (Dusty is Johnnie B. Jr.) wasn’t convinced that his oldest son’s athletic career was over before it had really begun. The elder Baker took his son to be evaluated at the then-new Kaiser hospital in Oakland. The specialist there told them that Dusty’s condition was not life-threatening—he said the lanky teen would simply grow out of it and that he could resume sports. So Dusty returned to his team just in time for the season’s last game, joyously splashing through the rain and mud. “That was the most fun I ever had,” he recalls.