Baseball: Los Angeles Dodgers Dusty Baker (12) sits in the dugout vs Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field. Bronx, NY 8/17/1981 CREDIT: Heinz Kluetmeier (Photo by Heinz Kluetmeier/Sports Illustrated via Getty Images) (Set Number: X25947 TK1)
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The Los Angeles Dodgers have built one of baseball’s most celebrated histories, with generations of stars helping establish the franchise as a perennial National League powerhouse.
Among those players was Dusty Baker, who spent eight seasons in Los Angeles and became one of the defining figures of the Dodgers’ championship era.
Baker earned two All-Star selections with the Dodgers, won the 1977 National League Championship Series MVP Award and played a central role on the club’s 1981 World Series championship team. He later went on to a legendary managing career and now serves in a front office role with his former team’s fierce division rival, the San Francisco Giants.
Decades later, his son Darren Baker is set to start another chapter of his own career, this time joining his dad with the Dodgers’ hated in-state rival.
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The San Francisco Giants are finalizing a minor league deal with Dusty Baker’s son, second base prospect Darren Baker.
“The Giants are finalizing a minor league deal with Darren Baker, who will join Triple-A Sacramento when it’s done,” NBC Sports Bay Area’s Alex Pavlovic reported. “A cool homecoming for Dusty’s son, who went to high school in the Sacramento area. He was in Triple-A with the White Sox earlier this season.”
The move gives the younger Baker an opportunity to continue his professional career while joining the organization his father once managed and now advises, shortly after he was cut from the White Sox organization.
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In addition to his father’s legacy with the Giants, Darren Baker has another notable connection to San Francisco’s franchise, even though it came long before he began playing professional baseball.
“The younger Baker already has one iconic moment in a Giants uniform, as he was famously scooped up at home plate by J.T. Snow during Game 5 of the 2002 World Series against the (Los Angeles) Angels,” MLB.com’s Maria Guardado reported. “Baker, who was a 3-year-old bat boy at the time, ran home to retrieve a bat after Kenny Lofton tripled off the right-field wall, but he quickly found himself in peril after accidentally rushing into oncoming traffic at the plate.”
Dusty Baker was the Giants’ manager at the time and now, nearly 24 years later, the father-son duo will be returning to the Giants organization as a pair.
Darren Baker will also be in some familiar company with the Giants, who have added a number of famous baseball players’ family members.
The Giants selected outfielder Peyton Bonds, the nephew of Barry Bonds, in the third round of the 2026 MLB Draft. They later acquired Kaeden Kent, the son of Hall of Famer Jeff Kent, from the New York Yankees as part of a recent trade involving Heliot Ramos.
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