Dusty Baker knows for him to complain about minority hiring in baseball right now might sound like sour grapes. After all, he’d recently been considered for the Nationals' open managerial job, only to see it go to Bud Black.
But he tells the San Francisco Chronicle he thinks Major League Baseball has a problem with minority hiring. Less than 10 percent of players are African-Americans, and there are no black managers in the majors. In 2002, there were eight black managers.
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“If that’s not backwards, I don’t know how much more backwards we can go,” Baker told reporters Friday during an appearance at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.
He later told the Chronicle that, “You wonder if it’s an accident or by design.”
With most MLB teams embracing younger front-office executives with expertise in statistics and baseball sabermetrics, there’s less emphasis on hiring experienced managers.
Baker, 66, has 20 years of managerial experience, with a career mark of 1,671-1,504.
“How many teams are willing to accept what we have to offer? We’ve got something to offer,” Baker told the Chronicle. “How much respect do they have for my knowledge and expertise and wisdom over the years? There’s a certain thing called a life experience degree. There used to be.
“I get tired of talking about it. We should be talking about another issue at this point in time. We’re talking about the same thing we were talking about 40 years ago.”