There are few people in sports that I despise more than Dusty Baker. Brett Favre. ARod. HHH. Moises Alou. Tony La Russa. Alex Gonzalez (the Cubs SS.) Steve Garvey. AJ Pierzinski.

The reason I hate Dusty Baker is rather simple. The 2003 NLCS versus the Florida Marlins. Steve Bartman reaches out and interferes with a ball that Moises Alou tried to catch. It shouldn’t have been the end of the world. The Cubs were FIVE OUTS away from the World Series. Shake it off. Fans reach for baseballs all the time. It is STUPID. A baseball costs $15. Buy one if you want one so damn bad. Be smart enough to know what is going on and be aware of your surroundings. Let YOUR team try to play for the ball. But that never happens. Steve Bartman did what 97% of other fans in the stadium would be doing. You can’t blame Bartman for what happened next.

Moises Alou slammed his glove down in disgust and pitched a fit like a 5 year old in the grocery store that was just told he couldn’t have a candy bar.

Does Dusty Baker come out of the dugout and try to calm down his team? No. He just sits their like a bump on a log and chewing his toothpick. Why act like a manager and manage the team? Why collect everyone and tell them to breathe and relax and move on? Just a blip on the radar. No big deal. Still just FIVE OUTS away with a lead and the ace on the mound.

Then Alex Gonzalez, a player that is supposed to be stellar defensively, pisses down his leg and lets a routine groundball go between his legs.

Does Dusty Baker come out of the dugout now and try to calm his OBVIOUSLY shaken to the core team? Hell no. He’d much rather sit on the bench with his thumb up his ass. Maybe it was after his bedtime and he had fallen asleep. He definitely shouldn’t have taken Mark Prior, whom at this point had thrown well over 100 more innings than he had ever thrown in a single season, out of the game. Let the kid with the shaken nerves and the overly fatigued arm continue to throw. What could go wrong?

Mark Prior never recovered. He never came close to throwing 200 innings again. Kerry Wood got the same treatment from Dusty (although he had pitched over 200 innings the year before as well) and would never come close to topping 200 innings pitched every again. Matt Clement wouldn’t top 200 innings pitched again either although he did come close. Three star pitchers rode into the ground in one season that were never the same afterwards. 10 years later and all 3 are out of baseball and the Cubs have never been that close to a World Series since.

Now let’s look at this year’s Cincinnati Reds. They won the division going away. Yet he pitched Aroldis Chapman in 68 games for 71.2 innings. Only 5 times in 16 years as a closer has Mariano Rivera pitched more innings and only 3 times has he appeared in more games. That is a lot of wear and tear that was unnecessary on a guy that throws 100+ MPH. Chapman had to miss a couple of weeks down the stretch or who knows how ridiculous those games and innings pitched numbers would have been.

Dusty obviously has learned from his mistakes and now a team that he took on the road to San Francisco and led to a 2-0 lead in the best of 5 NLDS has been beaten. That’s right, the Giants have come back from an 0-2 deficit and beat the Reds 3 straight games in Cincy to win the series. All the while, Dusty continues being oblivious to the damage he has done and the wreck that he has left behind. When he gets run out of Cincinnati after this collapse, he’ll credit the stroke at the end of the season for being the reason why. He’ll then talk about all the racist letters he received from Red’s fans just like he did when leaving Chicago. It is always someone or something else’s fault with Dusty Baker.

Get rid of him now Cincinnati before he kills Latos, Chapman and Bailey and ruins your franchise’s future.