The National League Manager of the year has shown a special kind of savvy that may have significance far past the playing field. But this can be hard to see as long as press coverage of sports (and everything else) focuses on what goes wrong instead of what works. PNS associate editor Joan Walsh, a Bay Area based journalist, authored a recent report for the Rockefeller Foundation entitled "Stories of Renewal: Community Building and the Future of Urban America."

Race wasn't an issue when San Francisco Giants Manager Dusty Baker became National League Manager of the Year October 9 -- and that's both a measure of how far we've come on race relations, and how far we have to go.

Baker, one of two black managers in baseball, won the sport's highest managerial honor for the second time in five years for his baseball savvy, his charisma and his team-building skills.

Baker took a roster of journeyman players and made them into a team, way more than the sum of their parts. The Giants, who were supposed to finish last, won their division playing scrappy Baker-ball. They led the league in sacrifice flies, in one-run victories, in come-from-behind wins.

Sports coverage, like all of journalism, is quick to highlight examples of racial tension and misunderstanding, but commentators have mostly ignored Baker's genius in bridging the chasms of race that divide other teams.

Indeed, the Los Angeles Dodgers' lack of cross-racial chemistry was frequently mentioned as part of why they lost to the Giants. In the 1990s, Dodger management recruited players to match the team's increasingly Latino and Asian market. The team became a mirror of the Balkanized, polyglot city it represents. In mid-season, star catcher Mike Piazza complained openly that players couldn't even talk to one another.

By contrast, Baker's skill at managing a team almost as diverse went unnoticed. Why this silence? Baker himself -- he is 48, speaks fluent Spanish and is married to a native San Franciscan of Filipino descent -- can be tight-lipped on the topic. In his rookie managerial season, asked if he thought a black manager made a difference to the team, he replied, "I didn't even think about that. My attitude is, I've got a job to do, and it's not a matter of black and white." 

In later interviews, he was more forthcoming. Today, he rejects the notion that his ease in a cross-racial situation is either instinctive, or effortless, or the result, as some pundits suggest, of growing up a popular star athlete in an all-white suburb of Sacramento. "Actually, there was a time when I was really militant, really angry. When I got to the minor leagues, in Richmond [Virginia], we couldn't live in the white neighborhoods, we had to live in the ghetto. We were just kids, but nobody from the team cared about us.

"Look at all my early baseball cards -- I'm not smiling. I was angry. I was very taken with the Black Muslims, their togetherness. But my old man wouldn't let me join," he laughed. "And my sister kept telling me: Don't harden your heart."

He didn't. Baker found strength in diverse places -- the Bible, the proud, spiritual black baseball tradition, and music.

He says racial separatism in the clubhouse is best combated by example, not mandate. "Sure, I'd like to see more mixing, but there are reasons there isn't. White people aren't used to thinking about their race -- black people have to think about it all the time. But on the field, we're a team. In that clubhouse, we're together."

Surprisingly, Baker praised the Dodgers' Piazza for raising the issue of that team's ethnic divides. "After he talked about the communication problems, the Dodgers started to win for a while, because they started to come together as a team. People complained about his saying it, but it was the first step to taking it on as an issue.

"If there's one thing I've done that's made a difference, I think it's the diversity of my coaching staff. It matches the team -- I've got African Americans, Latinos and whites. If you can't find somebody on my staff you can talk to, you're not trying. It helps if everybody is represented all through the team, up to the front office.

"And we're lucky to be in San Francisco. We attract a certain type of person throughout the organization -- if you don't like blacks, or Asians, or whites, or gays -- well, you're not gonna want to live here."

Giants Catcher Brian Johnson thinks the way Baker revels in difference sets a tone. "He doesn't try to muzzle cultural differences. He enjoys them. People talk about diversity, but what are they doing in their personal life? Do they have close friends of another race? Dusty does, and you can feel that."

Baker's approach to race bears attention because we have so few models for making diversity work. We're all hooked on this idea that multiculturalism means strife, that integration has to be like castor oil, necessary but unpleasant.

The Giants' success this year suggests a different way of life, it confirms that we have a lot to gain if we all could really get along.