Excuses, excuses: Baker had a million of them

In the corner of the Cubs' dugout is a seat often obscured by players and coaches.

It's safe from the TV cameras, from the fans' wrath, and sometimes from the game itself.

And there should be a sign above this warm, cozy spot that reads:

"Dusty Baker slept here.''

He did, for the better part of his final two seasons in Chicago that were memorable mostly for how uninspired his players were after taking their cue directly from the manager.

The oddest part is that after failing to share the blame for any of what occurred during his $14 million tenure in Chicago, Baker has suggested that GM Jim Hendry didn't spend enough to make the Cubs competitive, only doing so after firing Baker and hiring Lou Piniella.

"I'm surprised because when he took the job, he knew exactly what our payroll was going to be,'' Hendry said Tuesday at Wrigley Field, moments before Baker took to the interview room and addressed the Chicago media. "Our payroll was one of the highest in the game some of the years he was here.''

That woe-is-me Baker wasn't outwardly apparent Tuesday, and he continued to kiss and make up with a press corps that carved him up incessantly during his last year on the North Side.

"I'm trying not to live in the past,'' Baker said quietly. "I'm happy where I am. I'm just trying to move forward and be as happy as I can be.''

He did complain a bit Tuesday about not getting a job for the 2007 season, saying he deserved another chance, and that, "I thought I was a pretty good manager before.''

He was when he arrived in Chicago with a chip on his shoulder, fresh off his firing in San Francisco, an appearance he gives now in his first year in Cincinnati, where he looks engaged and even interested.

That was hardly the case in 2005 or 2006.

"At the end, I made a decision in my heart that I felt was best for the organization,'' Hendry said. "That's my job.''

Even then, Hendry went out of his way to defend Baker, sometimes to his own detriment, and with all the revising of history the past couple days, it's easy, apparently, to forget Baker's failures.

But it was Baker who defended, coddled and enabled Sammy Sosa -- as he did Barry Bonds -- and then happily threw Sosa under the bus when Sosa was no longer useful.

He turned his back on Steve Stone, who helped him get the job, and turned away from the fans, hinting once that race played a role in their displeasure.

A team inevitably takes on the personality of its manager, and the Cubs after Derrek Lee was injured in 2006 became an underachieving group that lacked discipline, preparation, execution, and more than anything, responsibility.

Baker always had someone else, or something else, to blame, but it was never his fault the Cubs were falling apart.

There were botched double-switches and errant pitching changes, but those were others' mistakes.

He never heard of steroids before yesterday, wouldn't know a cork if you pulled it out of his wine bottle, and to this day we're certain he doesn't know what happened to all the missing bats.

Sure, he believes Sosa hurt his back sneezing just before arriving in the clubhouse, and, no, he never heard Kent Mercker screaming at Stone, even though he was a few feet away on a quiet airplane.

He had no problem playing young players, except for the part about not wanting to play them.

He couldn't change Sosa, even though it was his job to do so, just as he couldn't talk Prior out of returning to a game in 2003 after injuring his pitching shoulder in a collision with Marcus Giles.

Funny, because we thought that was the manager's job, too.

In his defense, not even Piniella's been able to get Aramis Ramirez to run out of the batter's box or field his position, but to take the city's temperature the last couple days, Baker was returning a conquering hero, having won the Nobel Peace Prize and a batting title in his spare time.

The fans obviously disagreed Tuesday, booing ferociously the first time Baker left the dugout to make a pitching change in the bottom of the seventh.

They understand that if Baker were such a fine manager, such a solid example for young men, he'd still be here, dozing in the Cubs' dugout.

Yes, Baker slept here, but if you're considering a different bumper sticker from his time in Chicago, you might just go with this:

Dusty Baker never met an excuse he didn't like.