Chipper Jones: A Brave for the ages

It is but a glorified closet, a phone booth with hangers, really. Baseball’s equivalent of Dilbert’s cubicle, it is Chipper’s locker.

But Chipper Jones has a new locker this year, moving around the clock face of the Braves’ circular clubhouse to the high-noon position so long homesteaded by John Smoltz.

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AP

Entering a 16th season with the Braves, Chipper Jones is one of only nine active players — with at least 10 years in the majors —to have spent an entire career with one team.

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Rich Addicks/raddicks@ajc.com

Legend Hank Aaron talks with Chipper Jones during spring training. Aaron believes Jones is among the Braves’ greats.

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Jones, a wizened 36 turning 37 later this month, wisecracked: “Well, it’s closer to the bathroom, and you know, as you get older you need that.”

The new position is more complicated than that. With the advantage of prime real estate comes great responsibility.

It’s understood that the occupant of that locker is the alpha Brave, the man expected to set the theme and tempo of a season. The maestro’s baton is super-glued to Jones’ hand now.

“Smoltz had [the locker] since 1997, and he was the captain of our club, the guy who called all our meetings. That position falls on me now,” Jones said. His first act upon taking over from Smoltz was to parboil the Braves for letting the pitcher get away.

The Braves never have needed Jones more. The city behind the team never has asked more from him.

That was committed to paper last week when he signed a contract extension with an option year that would take him through 2013, building a bridge to his 40s and essentially making him a Brave-for-life.

Leadership earned

At the beginning of a new season, now three years removed from the Braves’ last playoff series, Jones just has to be a leader worthy of his new changing station.

There is no choice, he absolutely must stay in the lineup, even if it means getting to the batter’s box on a gurney.

“I don’t think he has ever been more necessary and more of a leader,” Braves chairman Terry McGuirk said.

Entering a 16th season with the Braves, Jones is the president of a very exclusive club. Only nine active players with at least 10 years of major league service enter this season having spent their entire careers with one team.

No one else is really close to Jones. Not Derek Jeter nor Mariano Rivera with the Yankees (14 years), not Todd Helton with Colorado (12), not Lance Berkman with Houston (10).

A full generation has come of age with Jones in Atlanta.

“He is like family,” McGuirk said. As with family, there is album after album of shared history. A city has lived with his every mood, his surgical candor, his body of work, the workings of his body and even something as personal as his infidelity during his first marriage.

If not for Jones, there would be thousands of us with no idea the human body even contained an oblique muscle, let alone that it could be pulled with the next sneeze.

On that score, Jones warns that hitting from both sides — with the different stresses that imposes on his torso — makes him continually susceptible to the injury that disabled him twice in 2006, revisited him in subsequent seasons and has reappeared this spring. His one-man physiology lesson is ongoing.

If not for Jones, Atlanta would not know the pleasure of a long-standing, reliable relationship with an athlete. Smoltz is playing Fenway now. Tom Glavine is hanging on by a ligament. The most-tenured Falcon, Keith Brooking, just got chased into the Cowboys’ arms.

That leaves Jones, the holder of any Atlanta Braves offensive record worth having (since Hank Aaron did so much time in Milwaukee).

“The names are synonymous: Atlanta and Chipper Jones,” Braves manager Bobby Cox said.

This spring, Jones compared blisters with Aaron around the Orlando batting cage, discovering that their two batting grips are so similar that he gets them on the same portion of his palm as Aaron used to. For years to come, when the discussion turns to hallmark Braves, the two of them will have many more substantial qualities in common.

Elsewhere on the all-timer front, Jones overtook Dale Murphy in career home runs by an Atlanta Brave in 2007. He’s sitting on 408 and still can aim at a loftier milestone.

“He could get to 500 — I think he will,” Cox said.

Jones eclipsed Murphy in games (he’s now at 2,023) and at-bats (7,337) last season and will pass him for the team record for most seasons played (by a non-pitcher).

If Jones never owns Atlanta’s devotions as completely as the genial and devout Murphy did in the 1980s, then a little simple respect will do.

“The overriding impression I’ve gotten from people the last couple of years is that they are appreciative. That’s what I’m proudest of,” he said. “For 15 years I’ve busted my can to be competitive and set a good example. To know that the people watching are appreciative after all these years is awfully satisfying.”

The numbers he has compiled lately have mocked the notion of inevitable decline. The past three seasons, he has led the majors with a .342 average (winning his first batting title last year), and been second in on-base percentage (.435) and fourth in slugging (.592).

“That,” said Aaron, who knows better than most, “comes from reaching a stage where you have the utmost confidence in what you can do.”

Injuries endured

Jones also made five trips to the disabled list in that time, appearing in an average of only 124 games. The purest swing in creation — and Jones’, from either side, is on that short list — doesn’t do anyone a bit of good confined to the dugout.

Great player, can’t stay on the field — that’s the thumbnail description of Jones any Braves fan has at the ready. The perception of being as breakable as an Elvis commemorative plate doesn’t sit well. Jones asks, what about my first full 10 years, when I averaged playing 153 games?

That said, he realizes, “This club can’t afford for me to be out extended periods of time. Yeah, a day here, a day there. But I do feel I have to play 150 games.”

His place as the indispensable player is clear. Jones will give the Braves the smartest at-bats they’ll see this season — “I’m as mentally prepared when I walk out on the field as anybody,” he declared.

“He’s always been a good hitter, but now he’s at the point where he is one of the elite hitters,” general manager Frank Wren concurred.

He will help any of the Braves’ young players who pay attention, those who know that they don’t know everything.

“I could talk the mental aspect of hitting all day. All day,” Jones said.

Seems like just a minute ago, he was the Braves’ wonder boy, recovering from a blown-out knee but still brimming with promise. And here he is today, the venerable soul on the far side of what he sees as a “big generation gap” between himself and many of his young teammates.

With age — “I’m cool with it; I’m actually looking forward to getting older” — Jones also has gained a measure of security uncommon in the shifting sands of baseball.

The new contract gives him the platform to finish out a singular Braves career. The priceless part of the deal is that it gives him time. Time to finish what he started, where he started. Time to put the fine point to his Hall of Fame numbers and to flesh out the nuances of personality and leadership that are part of being a truly iconic player.

When his time is done, Jones might even have earned himself a spot in the Turner Field statue garden where Aaron, Phil Niekro, Warren Spahn and Ty Cobb rule.

“I think he should be there. He has done everything he could do to get there,” said Aaron, validating Jones’ final act of legacy making.