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 “the Summer of Love,” and Dusty’s mom bought him two tickets to the Monterey Pop Festival as a birthday present.
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.
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.
He would go on to a 19-year career as a player, mostly in Atlanta and L.A., a star and a clutch performer—MVP of the 1977 National League Championship Series—known 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.
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.
BOOK HIM Dusty Baker’s 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
“Seeing all of them was as much fun as I’d ever had in my life,” Dusty writes in his new book, Crossroads: A Memoir in Baseball and Life (Crown), which I helped him write, launching with a Bookshop Santa Cruz appearance on Monday, June 8—along with me—Dusty’s first event for the book. “A lot of musicians I’d 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’d seen something that changed our lives.”
Back in 2015, Dusty and I worked on a little book, Kiss the Sky: My Weekend in Monterey for the Greatest Rock Concert Ever, which I published through Wellstone Books, earning national coverage, including an article in The New Yorker magazine. (People seemed mostly interested to hear that Dusty once shared a joint with Jimi Hendrix—true story—and that he helped invent the high five.)
At the time, Dusty was still a big-league manager, or trying to be—and 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’s World Series in a corner table at Kianti’s Pizza & Pasta Bar. I had to red-eye it to the Series that night, to report on the Mets for my book Baseball Maverick, all about former Oakland A’s general manager Sandy Alderson, by then with the Mets.
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.
Dusty’s 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.
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:
“A week before he was introduced as the Washington Nationals’ 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, ‘Kiss the Sky,’ sat there disappointed.”
This is how Dusty describes that Santa Cruz experience in Crossroads: “I 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.”
The stories about Dusty in Santa Cruz speak to a deeper truth about the man: He’s 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, he commented to me that they ought to pick someone with a California accent. A lot of East Coast people don’t even know what we mean when we talk about a California accent, because it’s a way of speaking that tries to connect people, not make them feel excluded.
Dusty was born in Riverside, California, and grew up in a mixed community where Blacks and Latinos and whites all hung out and didn’t 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—the other being his brother, Rob.
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 home run of his career, famously breaking Babe Ruth’s 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.
A week before the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, Dusty kneeled next to his bed at the family home near Sacramento and prayed: “Please, God, not the South!”
It was the day before baseball’s amateur draft, and Dusty didn’t 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.
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—and 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’s 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.
“On the bus ride back to the hotel, I sat next to Hank Aaron,” Dusty writes in Crossroads. “I 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’t like we were shooting the breeze. How much does a kid talk to Hank Aaron? He asked me some questions about our family.
“’Are you going to sign?’ he asked me.
“’Mr. Aaron, I don’t know,” I said. “It’s a big decision.”
“He 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.”
“’If you have enough confidence that you’ll be in the big leagues by the time your college class graduates, then go ahead and sign,’ he told me. ‘If not, then you go to school.’”
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 – but the biggest lessons taught were about remembering advice you’re given so you can try to apply it later—and 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.
“If you don’t trust your feelings, you can never be a great hitter,” Dusty writes in Crossroads. “If you feel it, it’s probably true. That was what Hank taught us. If something tells you that the pitcher is going to throw you an outside fastball, he’s 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.”
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’s 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.
Hey, I know the feeling, and maybe it’s my turn for the corner spot on the sofa when my wife and my daughters and I watch “Top Chef” together on the screen and I can just unplug a little. But it’s 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’s world, that means you stay open to them as long as you can, and look for the best in them.
VICTORY Baker led the Houston Astros to a World Series victory in 2022.PHOTO: Courtesy of the Houston Astros
“Trust your feelings,” he writes in Crossroads. “Some people reading those words might think I’m talking about a hunch. Or an inkling. Those are words people use when they don’t trust their feelings. An honest feeling is much deeper than a hunch or inkling. Feelings are powerful. Feelings are true. Feelings sometimes can’t be explained. They come from the inside, but it’s an external power that gives you that feeling in the first place. It’s similar to when you sense danger. You can’t 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’ll find you’re 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’re sometimes better at knowing what they know.”
If you’re 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’s 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.
I’ll just say this about Dusty. I’ve known him since the 1990s, I’ve worked with him on different projects, and he’s the rare person who always makes me want to be a better person myself, just by his example.
Just 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.
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.
Dusty Baker represents a bridge back to an earlier era of baseball loaded with personalities such as Satchel Paige—as a rookie on the Braves, Dusty used to carry Satch’s fishing poles for him—and 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.
Dusty hasn’t yet made the Baseball Hall of Fame, although he is expected to. However, in 2025 he was inducted into the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum’s Hall of Game:
I’ve 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’s belief in his fellow man that I find inspiring, and that makes his story so worthy of study.
Out on San Francisco Bay fishing one time in 1999 with his friend Tom Stienstra, the longtime outdoors columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and then the Examiner, Dusty told Tom: “Back on the Braves, Luke Appling took me aside and told me, ‘To be lucky, you’ve got to think lucky,’” Dusty explains in his book. “That goes for anything. If you don’t think lucky in fishing, you don’t catch any fish. Am I lucky? It’s true, I’m lucky. If you think you’re lucky, that’s what you get. My son Darren is the perfect example: He always catches fish because he always thinks lucky.”
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.
“I 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,” Stienstra writes in his new book Heaven Delayed: One Man’s Survival of Sixteen Near-Death Encounters (Wellstone Books, 2026). “I 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.”
The conversation continued.
“I, too, wondered for a long time why my life had been spared,” Dusty said. “You probably are going through the same thing. I’ve gotten to the point now that I believe we have been saved because there is more for us to do. We’re still alive to do it. Keep your goal in your mind, body and soul. Keep living and enjoying every moment.”
