DEL.ICIO.USMajor League Baseball: Atlanta Braves
Glavine isn’t the first Brave to suffer an ugly ending
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Saturday, June 06, 2009
The Braves brass summoned the proud old pitcher to a private meeting, one of those high-ranking huddles where nothing good ever happens.
They dropped the news on him like a falling baby grand.
Johnny Crawford/jcrawford@ajc.com
Tom Glavine disputed the reasons for his release from the Braves during a radio interview Friday.
Whatever the words were, this is what the pitcher heard: You’ve had a great career, old sport. You’ve meant the world to us. Yadda, yadda. But you’re useless to us now. Gotta get younger. You’re so yesterday. Nothing personal. And don’t let the door hit you on your wrinkly backside on the way out.
“That hurt bad,” said Phil Niekro, the Hall of Fame knuckleballer who at 44 was cast off by the Braves at the close of the 1983 season. After 25 years with the organization, no less. “I thought I was going to end my career with the Braves.
“What struck me is that they [then-owner Ted Turner and then-GM John Mullen] said, ‘We know you can still win, we know you can still pitch in the major leagues, but we’re going to go with the youth.’ “
What, you thought Tom Glavine or John Smoltz invented the whole wounded-icon genre?
Practically no one is immune to the ugly ending in the sports business. No matter how long and how well the athlete might have served one team, no matter how much goodwill he generated, chances are good he one day will face a bitter last act.
There is a litany of such controversies throughout Atlanta sports history.
Good grief, the greatest of Hawks, Dominique Wilkins, was sent off to the Elba of the NBA — the Los Angeles Clippers — just so the Hawks could rent Danny Manning for a few months in 1994.
Today is all about transitions. Yes, the Braves already this year have parted unceremoniously with two of the cornerstones of their long run of titles, Smoltz and Glavine. One a noted postseason performer and most versatile arm these Braves have known. The other, a World Series MVP who one-hit a fearsome Cleveland lineup for eight innings in winning the last game of 1995.
Yet, the team Sunday afternoon also trots out Tommy Hanson, whose major-league pitching debut is being treated like a Hollywood premiere. It is believed, however, the Braves will forego rolling out a red carpet from the dugout to the mound.
Enjoy every moment, kid, because there are any number of one-time Atlanta stars who will tell you the career is too brief. And there often is a crash waiting at the finish.
The bad end is all but built into the dynamic of this business, say those who have lived through the trauma. There comes a time when the ego of the athlete and the team’s imperative to win meet head-on.
“Players don’t want to quit,” said Dale Murphy, the Braves’ two-time MVP who was traded to Philadelphia in August 1990. “Then you’ve got the other side thinking business. Those are two opposing factors that work out really well throughout most of a guy’s career, but when it comes towards the end, those two things conflict.”
“You hardly ever leave on your own terms unless you just walk away from the game, and say, ‘That’s it I’ve had enough, I can’t do it any more,’ ” Niekro said.
“Even when I retired I thought I could still play. Even right now [at the age of 70] let me go to spring training, and I think I can get some guys out.”
Murphy had seen how it played out between the Braves and Niekro and didn’t want to be in the middle of a similar drama. So, as his contract was running out in ‘90, and his performance was slipping, he approached then GM/manager Bobby Cox. Murphy told Cox he would probably be leaving as a free agent at the end of the season anyway, so if any trade appeared in the meantime, he would consider it. Shortly after, the 34-year-old Murphy was gone to Philly, and the Braves were dealing with the fallout of trading away perhaps the most well-liked player in their history.
“A lot of fans will come up to me and say, ‘I was so mad at the Braves for trading you,’ and I have to go through the whole thing again,” Murphy said. “And say actually I started that whole thing.”
Call it a pre-emptive strike. “If you play in a city long enough, very seldom does it seem like [the parting] happens amicably,” Murphy said.
Murphy lingered a bit more than two seasons, ending in Colorado, deciding that if he couldn’t hit home runs at a mile high, there weren’t any more home runs to hit.
Niekro went on to win 50 more games with the Yankees and Cleveland, pushing his career total to 318. He finally was cut by Toronto at the age of 48, then ceremoniously pitched three final innings for a 1987 Braves team going nowhere.
While Glavine let the Braves have it pretty good Friday — breaking out words like “disappointed” and “betrayed” — remember that the wound is still fresh.
As the cast-off players get further away from the deed, they seem to arrive at a truce with it. Time has softened the initial blow to their pride, for all manner of players.
Jessie Tuggle didn’t want quit football, but football quit him in the preseason of 2001. Falcons coach Dan Reeves called in the team’s all-time leading tackler (and Ring of Honor linebacker) and told him there was no room for him on the roster. He was 36.
Grudgingly retiring, Tuggle said it took him a year to lose the “bad taste in my mouth” for how his 14-year career closed and at least that long to watch an NFL game without thinking, “I could make that play.”
Now, at 44, he looks at it quite practically: “I felt in my heart I could have played at least four more months, but I wasn’t given the opportunity. Now that I’ve aged, and become a little wiser, I figure something crazy could have happened and I wouldn’t be as healthy as I am now. [Retiring] could have been a blessing in disguise.”
And when Niekro is asked the question of what is owed to certain special players, he can sound downright managerial. “I don’t think they owe us anything. If anything, we owe baseball something. That’s been our livelihood; that’s how we’ve built our homes, bought our cars, fed our children.”
“It’s really hard for all of us who are fans of Glav and Smoltzie to not take it personally,” Murphy said. “It’s really hard, but no one is trying to do anything to anybody. It is just the business.”
At the finish, a player has to reconcile himself to the difference between an ideal and a cold truth.
There is the way it is supposed to end.
“In your mind you feel that as the season comes to an end, you get the opportunity to do it one more time,” Tuggle said.
“You have your family there and when all is said and done you can look up and wave goodbye and say,
‘You know what? I gave it my all, I gave my best and I’m not going to be back next year.’ “
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