Dusty Baker played for the Atlanta Braves from 1968 to 1975. Photograph by Louis Reqeuna / MLB Photos via Getty

It's one of the most widely pitied facts in all of sports: the Chicago Cubs last won the World Series in 1908. There have, of course, been glimmers of sunshine at Wrigley since then: Greg Maddux, Ryne Sandberg, Sammy Sosa. The 2003 Cubs, managed by Dusty Baker and led by Sosa and Moisés Alou, were one game away from returning to the series for the first time since the Second World War. Then they lost three straight to the Florida Marlins, blowing leads in games six and seven and confirming, to some, the “Curse of the Billy Goat." (Or, if you prefer, of Steve Bartman: he famously plucked an eighth-inning foul ball from the gloved reach of Alou, thereby setting the Marlins comeback in motion.) Baker lasted three more years in Chicago, but his team sank in the standings each season, along with the fortunes of the Tribune Company—ready to dump the Cubs—until he was finally let go, in 2006.

"We went from damn near the World Series," Baker, now sixty-six, told me before game two of the National League Championship Series, in which the Mets took a two-games-to-none lead over the Cubs, "to dismantling the team. I thought we were gonna reload! I was like, Man, how are we trying to win when we're getting rid of Sammy and Moisés at the same time!" (They both left in 2005.) "I lost damn near ninety home runs and two hundred and thirty R.B.I.s between them. Then Derrek Lee and Aramis Ramírez were hurt. We pretty much had a Triple-A team out there.”

Baker went from savior to scapegoat. "The city turned on me. It was tough, man. Every time I stepped on the field, I was booed. My wife was afraid of letting me go out in public by myself. She quit taking my young son to the games, where he'd hear his father booed and cussed at. That had a big effect on my life. But you try not to be a hard person. You try not to carry anything negative forward in your life."

Johnnie B. Baker Jr., born in Riverside, California, got his nickname from his mother, because, as a boy, he was constantly dirty. She ran a charm school and his dad had a civilian job in the military. They both loved music and Dusty fell for the blues early: "I liked the melody of it and the rhythmic sounds that the blues had," he writes in “Kiss The Sky,” his account of attending the three-day Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, which will be published by Wellstone Books next month. Baker, at his mother's behest, learned the piano, and he was poised to be lead singer of an otherwise all-white garage band in Sacramento, where the family had moved, before his parents intervened. "I was going to be Hootie and the Blowfish before Hootie," he writes.

He was all-city in baseball, and all-county in basketball, football, and track. But Baker, inspired by Bob Dylan and Van Morrison, wanted to be a writer. (He studied journalism, briefly, at American River College.) He was the five-hundred-and-third selection in the 1967 amateur-baseball draft, taken by the Atlanta Braves, and signed with the team later that year. (The bonus enabled his mother, siblings, and himself to attend college.) For his eighteenth birthday, a few weeks later, his mother gave him, he writes, "one of the great presents a mother could ever give a son: two tickets to the three-day Monterey Pop Festival that weekend, along with twenty bucks and use of the family car."

The teen-agers slept in the car and agreed on a rule to preserve their athletic futures: "No grass!" The last day, they watched Hendrix set his guitar on fire. "I knew what I was hearing and that was a guy who could give his music a crackle and growl and scream, could detonate it like a stack of dynamite, but do it all in_ the music, in _the groove, true to the integrity of his musical sources,” Baker writes of Hendrix. “And best of all, he was having himself one heck of a great time."

At its best, the book evokes not only the pleasure of music, but the connection between that experience and the joy of sports: