This isn't about Dusty Baker the manager. Statistics show that he ranks no lower than the 90th percentile in longevity, wins and winning percentage.

This is about the manager as employee, a notion that, though technically accurate, is not necessarily relevent in all circumstances.

	After leading the Giants to the World Series, Dusty Baker could hardly wait to wave goodbye to owner Peter Magowan.

We discovered this anew when the Giants basically left Baker to find his joy with the Cubs, if such a thing can be done. The two most obvious reasons, explanations aside, are that Baker wasn't sufficiently solicitous of his boss, the omnipresent Peter Magowan, and that he acted like a free agent in his free-agent year.

This won't do for a manager. A manager is eminently replaceable, as proven by the fact that over 125 years or so, there have been more than 630 major-league managers. That's more than four new ones a year, in an industry that has had as few as eight and as many as 30 such positions at any given time.

It is why Lou Piniella was allowed to leave Seattle -- because he was making more money than the Mariners' owners wanted to give him. It is why Art Howe is now with the Mets -- because Oakland general manager Billy Beane couldn't really abide him in the dugout, no matter what else he might say.

And it is surely why Baker is about to be the 37th man to try to solve the Chicago Rubik's Cube -- not including, of course, the hilarious College of Coaches of the early '60s -- since Frank Chance left in 1912.

Baker publicly talked up the Cubs. He groused about the Giants' insistence that he give himself fully to the idea of coming back to San Francisco. He complained that he had to keep proving to his employer that he was the right man for a job he'd been the right man for since 1993.

And Magowan? He wanted a more docile employee, a demand he never seems to have made of Barry Bonds or Jeff Kent.

Well, here's a flash, especially to Magowan. Some managers -- the ones who have won over an extended period of years -- are not mere employees, but part of the face of the franchise. Not because they can charm a reporter or schmooze with a TV hired face or give good radio, but because they show by their presence that the team the customers are paying to watch is in good hands.

Dusty Baker was no longer a mere employee. Even removing his appeal in the San Francisco Bay Area, which can't be quantified in any readily provable way, he stopped being an employee long ago. If he didn't prove that in 1997 when the Giants won the NL West, he surely did in 2000 when the Giants had the best record in the National League.

And Lord knows he proved it with oak leaf clusters when the Giants reached their first World Series Game 7 in 40 years.

But no, he still might end up in Chicago, trying to tart up a franchise whose last back-to-back winning seasons occurred when Baker was first a legal-age drinker.

Why Peter Magowan couldn't, or wouldn't, see this is open to many interpretations, none of them flattering for him. But he is no worse than Beane and Oakland owner Steve Schott were with Howe. And he is worse than the Seattle consortium, which at least admitted that Piniella's value was more than merely sentimental, which is why they squeezed outfielder Randy Winn from Tampa Bay in exchange for Piniella's services.

Right now, there are five managers who rise above employee level -- Baker (or so we thought), Howe (or so we suspected before he changed jobs), Joe Torre, Tony La Russa and Bobby Cox. Mike Scioscia is close, and so is Bob Brenly, because they have given World Series trophies to towns that never had them, and Bruce Bochy has been in San Diego longer than the Padres' record alone would suggest.

But everyone else is a day worker, relatively speaking, available for replacement at any time -- from Bob Boone on the front of the alphabet to Ned Yost at the end, and all points between. Managers are hired to be fired, like the good book of sports says, and they get fired pretty damned quickly.

Thus, if you have a manager who isn't an employee, you make allowances. You pay extra, you tolerate more, you ask more and you get more.

And you do all this because the manager makes a significant difference, in the way your clubhouse runs, in the way your team is perceived by the outside world, in the way it sits in the standings in your morning paper.

A good manager, given good players, will always produce -- wins, perhaps trophies, certainly money. A good manager, given bad players, probably won't. A bad manager, given good players or bad ones, almost never does.

The math, then, is simple. Some teams never find a manager who exceeds employee level. Those that do, have two choices: Keep and nurture the gift, or treat it badly enough to make it leave.

That is where the Giants left it with Baker. The mistake is theirs, and even for those few sensible souls who do not hold the next manager responsible for the events preceding his hiring, it is a mistake with a tab that takes years to clear.

You know. Like loan-sharking.

Ray Ratto is a columnist with the San Francisco Chronicle and a regular contributor to ESPN.com