Just imagine what Baker can do now

Yo, bro, the Reds introduced Dusty Baker as their manager Monday.

I have no choice but to suggest you disregard what I said when the Cubs were eliminated from the playoffs.

The ultimate disgrace for the Cubs isn't the Rockies and the Diamondbacks playing for a berth in the World Series.

No, the worst possible possibility was made possible when the Reds decided they trusty in Dusty.

Just imagine, if you dare, Baker leading the Reds to a world championship before the Cubs win their first since 1908.

Yikes, bro!

You remember Baker from when he managed the Cubs, don't you?

He's the guy with the toothpick and wristbands who frequently uttered "bro." The guy who said Monday in Cincinnati, "I can attract players to come here," just as he indicated five years ago in Chicago. The guy accused of overworking pitchers and being reluctant to play youngsters.

To Cubs fans, Baker enjoying a parade in Cincinnati would be like Brad Pitt parading Angelina Jolie down Aniston Avenue.

Maybe it would be justice, considering what Baker and the Cubs conspired to do to his image during his four years here.

When Baker arrived prior to the 2003 season, he was so highly regarded that he had to deny being a messiah. He was hired a month after taking the Giants to the World Series, when he was the hottest commodity on the free-agent market.

Four years later Baker was, well, dumbed down by Cubdumb. Cursed, if you will, by the most cursed franchise in all of sports.

Baker became a meathead Cubs manager just as all the others before him had.

The truth, bro, is that Baker is somewhere between the icon he was in San Francisco and the idiot he became in Chicago.

Anyway, here it is, 2007, and Baker has been reduced to settling for the currently hopeless Reds in eternally small-market Cincinnati.

Even worse for Baker is that fans there would rather have anybody else as manager.

"You're more than irritated," Cincinnati Enquirer columnist Paul Daugherty wrote to the Reds faithful in Monday's editions.

More than irritated? Already? My goodness, Baker hasn't even hired Wendell Kim as his third-base coach yet.

"Almost as soon as Baker emerged as a candidate last week," John Fay wrote in the Enquirer, "message boards and sports talk show phone lines lit up with unhappy fans."

One theory says the town isn't ready for the Reds to have a black manager, even though Bengals head coach Marvin Lewis is black.

"Is that it?" Daugherty wondered in print. "Tell me it's not … I'd like to think we're past skin color. Wishing doesn't make it so."

Sorry, I'm not accepting that the objections to Baker are racially motivated, not even if the periodically insensitive Marge Schott once owned the Reds.

No, bro, I'm thinking this has more to do with the Cubs card than the race card. Reds fans don't want someone who came from the black hole known as Wrigley Field's home manager's office.

Cub managers normally don't get another chance. They get fired and fade away. But Baker will manage the Reds, beating the odds and the curses and everything else.

Now if he beats the Cubs to a World Series … oh, no, bro!

That would be the ultimate disgrace for the Cubs and the ultimate revenge for him.

mimrem@dailyherald.com