maybe early in his career he was overrated given what he had achieved until then and given the (low) attention many others, Jack Sheldon, Tony Fruscella, whoever, got...
but the, say, best 20 percent of his albums taken together are a body of work which is simply astonishing...
(at chewy: from what i read he really survived that long... he must have been more robust physically than his 1950s promo pictures want to make you believe)
edit to add: while baker recorded "magical mystery tour" in the sixties, fruscella is reported to simply have said something such as "this is the end" when the beatles arrived in the US... i will never like baker better than fruscella, but baker was tougher it seems