"In the Time of Bobby Cox: the Atlanta Braves, Their Manager, My Couch, Two Decades and Me" By Lang Whitaker. Scribner, 240 pages, $24.
Atlanta Braves fans will read Lang Whitaker’s book to the final page.
Whether those fans enjoy the book, dislike it or emerge somewhere in between will depend on whether they believe longtime Braves manager Bobby Cox is worthy of emulation, which Braves players they have idolized or despised, and -- perhaps most determinative -- whether their fandom is so fanatical that the Braves’ won-lost record is the most important measure of happiness.
Whitaker is an Atlanta area native (North Fulton High School) who has since moved to New York City but never halted his worship of the Braves and especially Cox, team manager during the late 1970s and again from the 1990s through last year, when he retired.
Before moving to New York, while still in his 20s, Whitaker became a professional writer, eventually turning out features about music and sports for the Atlanta weekly Creative Loafing. For a long time, Whitaker has thought about writing a book explaining how Cox became his hero and his life coach, from afar.
The “couch” in the book’s subtitle refers to the piece of furniture where Whitaker sits, day after day, night after night, watching Braves baseball games. Although Whitaker has spent only a few minutes in person with Cox, the journalist, half Cox’s age, has adopted him as a parental figure of sorts.
As a chronicle of baseball, the book works well. Each chapter is built on a certain Braves player: Greg Maddux, Greg Norton, Mark Lemke, Chipper Jones, David Justice, Jeff Francoeur, Andruw Jones, Tom Glavine and Jason Heyward. The characteristics of the players combine with occurrences in Whitaker’s life, reflected in the chapter titles -- for example, “How Chipper Jones Is Like Going to College” and “How Tom Glavine Is Like Going on Safari to Africa.”
Some of Whitaker’s insights into the baseball players illuminate success and failure on the field, and a few of those insights carry nicely into success and failure in the lives of mortals without Major League Baseball contracts.
He writes that Jones “has always been a perfect fit in Atlanta, the de facto captain of the Braves for the last 15 years, the most literal extension of Bobby Cox on the field, and in many ways almost the king of the South -- a modern-day Rhett Butler of baseball.
"Chipper grew up in Florida, but he talked and acted as if he’d grown up in South Georgia in one of those towns with an old-school name like Cairo or Montezuma. I once heard Chipper describe a fly ball out by noting he’d made contact ‘as hard as the good Lord can let me hit a ball.’”
The book works less well when Whitaker tries to mesh his own life with the lives of Cox and Braves players. The transitions are mostly awkward. Worse, Whitaker’s life does not seem all that dramatic. He appears to have lived a mostly mundane existence, based on what he writes. If I had served as his book editor, I would have suggested cutting the personal anecdotes in half, at least.
Like Whitaker himself, Cox is difficult to portray dynamically because his trademark is his consistency. That means after Whitaker has explained Cox’s managerial strategies and player relationships and seemingly volcanic on-field temper once, the later explanations feel repetitious.
At the close of the book, Cox retires, surprising his fans (and perhaps his detractors) who said he would never actually leave the manager’s job voluntarily. Cox cries. Jones cries. Whitaker cries. Soon after, the Braves name Fredi Gonzalez as their new manager. Whether Gonzalez will help Braves fans forget Cox during the 2011 season remains to be learned.
Steve Weinberg is the author of eight nonfiction books. At age 62, he still plays baseball and also umpires games in Columbia, Mo.
Author appearance
Lang Whitaker signs copies of “In the Time of Bobby Cox.” 7 p.m. March 8, 2011. A Cappella Books at Manuel’s Tavern, 602 N. Highland Ave., Atlanta.
