Crossroads: A Memoir in Baseball and Life

by Dusty Baker

Legendary baseball player and manager Dusty Baker reflects on his extraordinary career—filled with invaluable lessons on perseverance, leadership, and living life meaningfully on the field and off.

Dusty Baker walked with baseball legends and became one himself. After he signed with the Braves in 1968 at the age of nineteen against his father’s wishes, no less than the great Hank Aaron promised to take Baker under his wing. Mentored by Aaron, Orlando Cepeda, and Willie Mays, Baker became a premier hitter, helping take the Dodgers to a World Series victory in 1981. He would bookend this with another championship in 2022, this time as a manager helping guide and redeem a Houston Astros team humbled by a cheating scandal. Respected by generations across the game, Baker has come to embody the spirit of the sport—and yet, to discuss his baseball career is only to scratch the surface of a remarkable life.

Crossroads will bring readers into the mind of one of baseball’s a curious, inquisitive thinker whose deep interest in the worlds of music, wine, and the simpler joys of life charts a journey of success, struggle, faith, and perseverance. Baker's memoir is filled with hard-earned wisdom and a love for life so plentiful, it seems to radiate from every sentence.

A true American original, counting among his friends presidents and dignitaries, bluesmen and artists, Baker weaves a spell of life at the crossroads, where fate turns on our decisions and the unexpected answers that sometimes seek us out when we least expect it.

416 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication June 9, 2026

About the author

Johnnie B. Baker Jr., known since youth as Dusty, was born in Riverside, California, and went to high school at Del Campo High near Sacramento. He was drafted by the Atlanta Braves in the June 1967 amateur draft and went on to a nineteen-year Major League Baseball career, finishing with career marks of 242 home runs, 1,013 RBIs and a .278 batting average. During his ten seasons managing the San Francisco Giants starting in 1993, he was a three-time Manager of the Year and took the team to the 2002 World Series. He also managed the Chicago Cubs and Cincinnati Reds. He lives near Sacramento with his wife, Melissa, and son, Darren, and has his own energy company, Baker Energy Team. This is his first book.