Dusty Baker's face tells a lot of different stories, but there is only one it tells in October.
Disappointment. Deflating, soul-crushing, hopeless disappointment.
With Thursday night's National League Division Series defeat to the Chicago Cubs, the Washington Nationals have reinforced their place in the panoply of the capital's legacy of failure.
But Baker's agonies extend far further. His 3,500 games rank him 15th all-time, and only one manager above him, Gene Mauch, is not in the Hall of Fame. His 105 postseason games ranks seventh all-time, and his nine postseason appearances ranks sixth.
But his postseason record of 44-61 and no World Series titles curse him. He has been on the mailed backhand of eight series losses in 11 tries (plus a play-in game loss in 2013), and been marked by the media-ocracy as an old-school players' manager who doesn't wrap himself in the comforting embrace of statistical analysis.
He is now Marv Levy and Don Nelson – the good manager who can't win the big one.
Only Levy and Nelson are in their respective halls of fame, and Baker probably won't be. Having no World Series titles (his bullpen dying in 2002 being as close as he ever got) dooms him as it has doomed Mauch, although Mauch made his reputation as a brilliant tactician with bad teams.
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But even if you take Baker's worst metric – the postseason record – he still ranks in the 90th percentile of the 699 managers in the game's history, though even then there's the caveat of the 200 some-odd interim managers who you may choose not to count.
This is not to claim he should be in the Hall of Fame. This is to claim he should be discussed, if only to determine if reputations in the postseason are the only way managers are allowed to be evaluated. Because if that's the case, Dusty Baker's world-weary October face makes that conversation a very short one.
