Drafted by the Moneyball A’s, he’s in his late thirties, younger than some active major leaguers. He reached Triple-A in the mid-2000s. Yet attitudes have evolved even over the course of his career. “The overwhelming paradigm that was pushed by the oldest generations of baseball was you need to be a tough, gunslinging, beer-swilling, slump-buster-finding asshole of a cowboy to be a good baseball player,” Baker says. “And what we’re realizing now [is] that that’s not necessarily a paradigm for anything… other than ruining a marriage and being unhappy.”
