Hire Jim Essian

With all of the time we spend here pointing and laughing at Dusty Baker, one might come to the conclusion that we harbor an unhealthy obsession with the man. I suppose this may be true. Considering his tenure here, where he fooled us all with that first surprise season, which only served to insure that we would spend the next three seasons slowly realizing the guy before us was a platitude-dispensing fraud and his approach to baseball was about as proactive as Europe’s handling of Nazi Germany prior to September 1st, 1939, one could be forgiven for devoting more time than normal to closely following what bullshit spews out of the guy’s mouth.

However, the motivation here is not simply to vent our spleen at a man who sold us a bill of goods, and then insulted the fans on his way out the door by blaming us for his failures. Speaking for myself, my motivation when writing about baseball is to rid the world of willful ignorance. It’s not a coincidence that “willfull ignorance” and “Dusty Baker” often intersect; it’s merely a coincidence that Dusty’s hazardous approach afflicted my team at one point in time.

So it follows that Dusty and his anti-intellectual, reactionary outlook happens to attract many like-minded individuals in the world of sports journalism. That’s fine. I take heart in knowing that, over time, these flat-earthers will eventually have gone the way of the dodo bird–which is why it is more with amusement, than annoyance, that I read some of this tripe. Today, I present to you the words of some guy named Pete Daugherty, as he laughably gives credence to Dusty’s “philosophy” while pointlessly scorching the earth of the well-researched field of sabremetrics.

At this point, I’ll just turn it over to Cousin Mose, who’s specialty is in taking down these troglodytes. Still, I can’t help but look forward to seeing how Dusty’s stubborn contrarianism (contrarianism? Never mind) will likely extinguish what had appeared to be a rare burgeoning youth movement for the Reds. MUHAHAHAHAHAAHAH.