Baker’s move good for everyone

There had to be trepidation in San Francisco when this baseball season began. For 10 years, the Giants had played for Dusty Baker, and in that time, he had become as much and as beloved a part of the city as the Beacon Hill trolley. And now he was gone.

IT WASN’T FOR LACK of faith in the new manager. Felipe Alou’s credentials were impressive and his reputation as solid as anyone’s in the business. But he wasn’t the man who had taken the Giants to three postseasons, including the team’s first World Series since 1989. He wasn’t Dusty.

Of course, no one else is Dusty Baker, either, and could never hope to be. He’s an original, like Casey Stengel and Whitey Herzog, a plain-talking baseball man with a twinkle in his eye and a ready quote on his lips, a man as folksy and as comfortable as a rocking chair on the front porch. You can’t have him around for 10 years and not miss him.

InsertArt(1969256)Yes, there were some in San Francisco who thought Baker had become perhaps too much of a folk character. But those were people whose idea of cutting loose is putting sugar instead of Sweet-N-Lo in their $4 cups of coffee; people who would never ever dream of throwing back their heads and howling at the moon. They’d be uncomfortable raising their voices at the cat.

For the most part, though, it was a bleak day when the Giants chose not to exert themselves to re-sign Baker and instead let him kick over his Harley and roar east to Chicago.

But what nostalgia may still have existed for Baker at midseason in San Francisco evaporated like spit on a griddle when the Giants came out of the All-Star break and ripped off a 10-1 run that had them going into Chicago to play their old skipper with an 11-game lead in the NL West. The Cubs won the opener of the series 3-0 on Tuesday.

Right now, letting Baker go has to look like a brilliant move. Going to Chicago, the Giants were 67-38, and the 29 games they were over .500 matches what they were at the end of last season, when they finished 95-66. Instead of getting worse when Baker left, a very good team got even better.

Which is, when you think about it, pretty much a perfect situation for both clubs, because if Giants fans are delighted with where they are, Cubs fans have every reason to be happy with the new attitude Baker has brought to the North Side.

The Cubs, who have finished 30 games out of first place in three of the past four years, were in first place during the first third of the season and, even though they’re stuck at .500 on the season, are still just 4.5 games out of first in the undernourished NL Central.

After watching their team finish 67-95 last year — behind every NL Central team but the pathetic Brewers — Cub fans find themselves in the unusual situation of looking forward to a pennant race with cautious hope. Boosting their hopes was management’s move last week to pick up center fielder Kenny Lofton and third baseman Aramis Ramirez from Pittsburgh.

Such moves are not the norm in Chicago, where Cubs management has become notorious for not showing any interest in mid-season improvements to the product, or any interest in actually competing for a pennant, being more than happy to watch the tourists and fans fill their beautiful park every day.

Given the low level of expectations in Wrigley, where the fans are happy as long as the beers are cold and the bratwursts hot, this summer qualifies already as one of the team’s better seasons. If the Cubbies can finish within five games of first, they’ll have equaled their performance of 2001. If they can make the playoffs, it will be the first time since 1998, when they were a wild card, and the third time since 1945, the last time the team appeared in — and lost — the World Series.

The bar in Chicago isn’t set that high.

And Baker, ever the optimist, is talking about how his team can still win the division, and his players are listening.

“He’s always positive, never negative,” pitcher Kerry Wood told the “Chicago Tribune last week. “He makes you want to play for him.”

In San Francisco, they’re saying the same thing about Alou. It’s not often you can say both teams making major managerial changes came out ahead. This is one of them.

Mike Celizic writes regularly for NBCSports.com and is a freelance writer based in New York. E-mail him at Celizic@yahoo.com