It's kind of funny how sometimes people, teams, companies, or any sort of entity gets a reputation for doing something.  And after a while, the reputation just gets brought up over and over, until it just becomes accepted fact that the reputation is deserved...until someone challenges that reputation, and on occassion people find that it really doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

The Hardball Times challenged just such a reputation in their season preview of the Reds.  During one of the early paragraphs of the piece, Justin Inaz states that:

[Dusty] Baker has a reputation as a manager who favors veterans, extremely so.  But...a look back at Baker's teams over the years shows that he did give a great deal of playing time to young talent.  All the following got significant opportunities as early 20-somethings under Baker's watch: Rich Aurilia, Rod Beck, Marvin Benard, Royce Clayton, Shawn Estes, Ryan Jensen, Darren Lewis, Matt Murton, Russ Ortiz, Mark Prior, Corey Patterson, Kirk Reuter, William Van Landingham, Allen Watson, and Carlos Zambrano.  So it's not like it's unprecedented for Baker to let a kid play.

Aside from the fact that I thoroughly enjoyed the first opportunity to mention the name William Van Landingham in many years, this got me very curious.  After all, we all know that Baker goes with veterans, right?  That's what everyone says about him.  It's been repeated so often people probably think that Baker is his middle name, and "hatesrookies" is his last name (who is not to be confused with Dusty Baker Burnsoutyoungarms, and that's a subject for a whole 'nother day).

Interestingly though, when I looked through the teams he managed over the years, I couldn't find a lot of examples where he played an older, underperforming player over a younger, talented player.  With the Cubs, there's the example of him playing Eric Karros over Hee Seop Choi in 2003, which Inaz points out seems to be the genesis of this whole reputation (though it's hard to say, in retrospect, that was a bad move - Choi hasn't had an MLB at-bat in two years).  And he probably could have played Ryan Theriot more in 2006 over Todd Walker, in a season where he was managing for his job.

But with the Giants, it's hard to find many instances where this occured.  Now, it also should be noted that, during his tenure with San Francisco, their management compiled one of the worst drafting and player development records in recent memory.  Most of the time, Dusty didn't have much in the way of youth to choose from.  I guess if you want to, you could argue that he should have played Mike Benjamin over John Patterson, or J.R. Phillips over Mark Carreon at some point, but overall there just didn't seem to be a history of making life hard on younger players that had serious potential.

So I guess I'm leaving it to the readers.  Are there instances that I'm missing here?  Do we think that Dusty had enough influence over personnel decisions to force the Giants' hand in signing veterans?  Am I "misremembering" history?  Or could this really be an overblown reputation?