DEL.ICIO.USAs new season begins, Braves manager stays the course
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 03/30/08
Bobby Cox says he really doesn't know what he's going to do and, in that gruff-speak of one of baseball's most accomplished managers, there is no reason to doubt him.
He feels fine, though he is going to need an artificial knee replaced. He still enjoys his work. This team he brings north from spring camp could be very good. Sneaky good.
 Brant Sanderlin/Staff | |||||
| Bobby Cox, who began his managerial career in 1978, has won manager of the year four times. | |||||
 Vino Wong/Staff | |||||
| Fans wait while Braves manager Bobby Cox signs autographs at spring training. | |||||
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Nevertheless, the Braves season that begins Sunday night in Washington may be his last. Cox turns 67 in May. He is a hands-down Hall of Famer, a four-time manager of the year — in three different decades — with nothing left to prove. His contract is in its final year and he suggested last spring — and quickly withdrew — the notion that this would be his last season.
While admitting he never expected to stay so long — this spring marks 30 seasons since the Braves made him the youngest manager in the National League in 1978 — Cox can't get himself to admit he could be ready to retire.
"No, not really. I don't want to," he said, then in the same breath adding, "We are getting older."
So begins a new season that has Father Time's cold touch upon it. Pitcher Tom Glavine, 42, is back, and pitcher John Smoltz's 40-year-old shoulder is coughing like an old truck engine. Third baseman Chipper Jones turns 36 next month, and he has only an option year remaining on his contract.
Moreover, John Schuerholz, who with Cox comprised the two-headed Mount Rushmore for this franchise the last 16 years, stepped down as general manager in October, becoming team president. He is 67 and out of the day-to-day operations.
If this is all not an overture for change, surely the violins are on cue.
Looking for context, Cox flashed back to 1996, when spring camp opened and the Atlanta Braves — for the one and only time — were the reigning world champions.
"I did enjoy that. But in my mind — I play mind games — I had myself hypnotized to the fact that we were starting completely over," Cox said. "We'd done nothing. Last year is out of my mind. And that's it. That's how I keep going."
He really doesn't know what he's going to do. In the meantime, and for six months to come, he has a game to run.
He runs from credit
Cox doesn't have a legacy, not yet. More accurately, the Braves are his living testament. The club's string of 14 straight division titles may never be matched. The closest rival, the New York Yankees, petered out last fall at nine straight.
To better assess how the franchise went from laughingstock — 16 losing seasons and eight last-place finishes between 1970-90 — it must be remembered how Cox help set up the Braves' renaissance in his five years as general manager (1986-90).
He finally convinced then-owner Ted Turner that the Braves had to dedicate themselves to player development.
Despite some of the best drafts in franchise history, the project stalled, forcing him to fire manager Russ Nixon and take on the job himself.
In 16 months, Cox had the Braves playing in the 1991 World Series.
"He drafted all the players and he basically created what this team has become known for," Smoltz said. "Didn't get as much credit as a general manager should get."
Cox long ago learned everything he needed to know about credit: He runs from it. Some managers will lecture on how they schemed the eighth-inning comeback, but Cox's post-game assessments are predictably protective of his players.
This has reduced his cachet. Where authors have found books in the musings of Los Angeles' Joe Torre or St. Louis' Tony LaRussa, Cox does not so easily share himself. It has been that way since his days managing the Toronto Blue Jays, which he took from worst to first between 1982 and 1985.
"Well, I just don't ... I've never been ... I got embarrassed in Toronto," Cox said. "Some articles were written about me, giving me too much credit about this and that. And I didn't want anything to do with that, because it still really is about the players.
"I started to shy away from stuff like that. I didn't want players reading about me and I still detest it today."
To date, he says he does not read the sports pages, an open contradiction in that he enjoys baseball writers, who in kind tend to like him. In fact, it is difficult to find anyone who doesn't.
"I've never heard a player — and I've been around baseball now 43 years — and I've never heard a player say something bad about Bobby Cox," said Fran Healy, former major league catcher and longtime friend.
Well, there are some. Once in Toronto, Cox followed a player into the shower to confront him over a poor ninth-inning at-bat and cut him from the team "when I didn't like what he said," Cox said. "And I don't think anyone in the clubhouse was sad to see him go."
Typically, Cox would not name him. Healy, who as a minor leaguer played for Cox and was a Yankees player when Cox was their third base coach in 1977, remembers when he was fast with his fists.
"I mean, he's a tough guy," Healy said. "Of course, the legs are gone so I don't think he has the mobility for a fight anymore. [But years ago] Bobby would fight in a heartbeat."
Ask any umpire. Yet when Cox broke the 75-year-old record for most career ejections in baseball history last year — 133 and counting — he did so with embarrassment, even if that embarrassment vanished the next time he ran out to dispute another call.
The umps, who should have the best reasons to begrudge him, can't.
"I can't speak for everybody else and there might be some views out there that I'm not aware of," 22-year ump Tim Tschida said last season. "But overall, I think he respects umpires ... and he knows that we go as hard as he does."
Even at 66.
Rooted in gratitude
Cox's modesty is rooted, perhaps, in the fact that he is lucky to be here.
In 1959, he was an 18-year-old kid with a bad arm, elbow surgery washing out his senior season at Selma (Calif.) High School. Scouted as a football and baseball prospect, he had fallen off the charts, only to be saved by geography.
In the San Joaquin Valley, Selma is just 8 miles from Parlier, Calif., the hometown of Red Adams, a scout for the Dodgers who happened to be home for a visit.
Adams' relatives told him, Cox said, there was a kid over in Selma that might make a ballplayer. "And if he [Adams] doesn't stop by and take [me] to Los Angeles with him and work me out and then sign me, yeah, I never would have been here."
Cox would spent eight years in the minors — the Braves had him at Class AAA Richmond in 1967 — learning how it all worked.
The payoff was two seasons with the Yankees (1968-69), where manager Ralph Houk conducted nightly clinics on how a team should be run.
Those years also settled the point that, at age 29 with a .224 average and two mangled knees, he was through.
In 1970, Yankees GM Lee MacPhail offered Cox a $1,000 bonus if he would go down to the minor league club in Syracuse, N.Y. Cox hit just .219 and MacPhail made a special trip late that season to see him. Cox figured MacPhail wanted the $1,000 back.
He was wrong.
"He said there was a [manager] opening at [Class A] Fort Lauderdale and he had talked to Ralph [Houk] about it and they thought I would do a good job."
Cox has since managed at every level over 32 seasons. He has had only five losing clubs.
Among other things, he learned the value of keeping a stress-free clubhouse; the game was hard enough.
That conviction became critical in 1990, when he walked down from the GM office to assume Nixon's job. The Braves were 15-40, psychologically whipped and no one in the clubhouse could envision the difference one man could make.
"At that point in time, yeah, we're not very good obviously and you always wonder how much difference a change is going to make," said Glavine, who eked out 10 wins that year. "He had a reputation already, but I don't think any of us envisioned it being what it turned out to be and Bobby being as good as he is, not just as a manager but as a person and how he treats the guys."
Next season, Glavine won his first Cy Young award, the Braves' mystique was initiated and Cox was held in a different light, which shines on him still.
"You've got to be your own guy but you take things when you break into pro ball," Cox said. "I mean, I played for many managers in the minors and South America. You pick up on things. One guy is different than the other guy and maybe this is the way you ought to think about doing things. You should treat guys the way you would want to be treated."
"But it was mostly Ralph. He was so good."
'Small doghouse, big lock'
Cox has fiddled with The Rules again. It's the uniform pants this time. No more "spats," where the pant legs cover the cleats. Now, the pant leg can touch the shoe top, but no lower. There were 16 rules when Cox first came on as Braves manager in 1978. No beards. No blue jeans. No music. Play hard. No tardiness.
"Bobby has a small doghouse," former shortstop Walt Weiss once observed. "But it's got a really big lock."
The no-beard rule is gone but Cox, 30 years later, still sets out some of the same regulations at the first full-squad workout every spring.
The rest is baseball.
"We get called up and from everybody, I hear, 'Oh, he's the best,' " said catcher Brian McCann, recalling midseason of 2005, when he, Jeff Francoeur and Kelly Johnson were summoned from the minors. "Then I get here, and we struggled for three or four days until we got locked in.
"He gave us a chance, and we've all succeeded. We owe a lot of it to Bobby."
Asked what sets Cox apart, former pitching coach Leo Mazzone said, "Aside from his common sense and his people skills, his ability to make people around him better than they are."
Critics see less value in Cox's method, asking foremost how such a great manager can wring just one World Series championship out of 14 Braves trips to the postseason.
Or worse, how could he possibly let Charlie Leibrandt pitch to the Twins' Kirby Puckett in the pivotal 11th inning of Game 6 in 1991.
Don't lay that stuff around the Braves clubhouse.
"I wouldn't use the word 'critics.' A critic seems to me like someone who knows what he's talking about," Smoltz said.
This year marks Cox' 49th in professional baseball. That there might not be a 50th rings strangely among those who know him.
"He's probably calmed down a little bit, but he had great passion for the game back then. And he still does," said Braves coach Glenn Hubbard, who played for Cox in the late '70s. "That's why he hasn't retired yet, because still loves what he does."
Cox still doesn't know what he's going to do, but there are two certainties: Whenever he steps down, it will be done quietly— and the Braves will not be the same.
"I don't know how you put into words what his legacy is," Glavine said. "I just know I feel bad for whoever it is that has to come in after him. Those are some impossible shoes to fill there."
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