With Andruw Jones’ election, remembering Braves’ staggering wealth of talent

On the occasion of his election into the Baseball Hall of Fame, Andruw Jones confirmed a story that has floated around about a conversation between him and the great Willie Mays.

It was at the batting cage in San Francisco before a Giants-Braves game during Jones’ career as the Braves’ sterling center fielder. Legend of it has been shared by David O’Brien, the former Braves beat writer at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and later the Athletic.

On a Tuesday night videoconference with media after Jones’ election was announced, it was brought up to him by another esteemed former AJC Braves writer, Carroll (Rogers) Walton.

Yes, Jones said, it happened. The late Mays, whose reputation as the best center fielder ever essentially was fact, did tell Jones that he was the best center fielder that he had ever seen.

Braves fans who saw him brilliantly defend his position might well agree with Mays.

But still — wow.

“He was the greatest center fielder of all time, and everybody admired how he went about his business, how he played the game,” Jones said of Mays. “So for him to tell me that was a great honor and something that, I took it to heart. I wanted to go out there and be the best at my position.”

A staggering compliment.

“For him to say that, it was something very special to me,” Jones said.

Which brings us to this:

For nearly all of 11 full seasons, Braves fans were treated to possibly the best defensive center fielder ever wearing their team’s uniform.

Not only that, but one of his teammates was possibly the second-best switch-hitter of all time (after Mickey Mantle): Chipper Jones.

For the early parts of their careers, Fred McGriff provided consistent left-handed power as he wrote his own Hall of Fame plaque.

And, on most nights, they played behind a special cadre of pitchers, including one of the 10 best left-handed pitchers ever, along with the only pitcher in major league history with 200 wins and 150 saves, as well as one of the top five pitchers in the game’s history.

That’s, of course, Tom Glavine, John Smoltz and the singularly dominating Greg Maddux.

As a group, five future Hall of Famers wore the Braves uniform together from 1995-2002 (although Smoltz missed the 2000 season with an elbow injury). (Technically, the roster had five in 1993, when Chipper Jones debuted late in the season before missing the 1994 season because of a knee injury.)

Andruw Jones’ arrival in 1996 made it an incredible sextet in the 1996-97 seasons. For those two seasons, nearly a quarter of the Braves’ 25-man roster was bound for Cooperstown.

And, of course, the man helming the ship (Bobby Cox) and the one assembling the roster (John Schuerholz) also were destined for the Hall of Fame.

Eight Cooperstown members simultaneously within one organization — six on the field — is just hard to fathom.

‘The perfect storm’

Before he became the Braves television voice, Brandon Gaudin was a young Braves diehard growing up in Indiana, connected to the team through TBS.

As a teenage fan, Gaudin had an awareness that something special was happening, he said in a phone interview Thursday, “but you don’t really appreciate the structure of a roster and how rare it is to have that much greatness on one team.”

After the two Joneses arrived, Gaudin remembered asking his father how the Braves kept finding all these great players.

A solid organization, luck and timing.

“And I think the Braves just had the perfect storm of incredible talent and all of these Hall of Famers being on the same team at the same time,” Gaudin said.

Moreover, four of them — Chipper Jones, Glavine, Maddux and Smoltz — are part of an even more exclusive fraternity, as they are four of the Hall’s 62 first-ballot selections.

It’s not the record for most future Hall of Famers in an organization at one time, which is held by the 1931-33 New York Yankees, with 11 — nine on the field (most notably, Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig) plus manager Joe McCarthy and owner Jacob Ruppert.

But consider this: The 1996-97 Braves had as many future Hall of Fame players as the 1927 “Murderers’ Row” Yankees, a team that was so dominant that for nearly a century it has been shorthand for an unbeatable powerhouse.

Another way of putting this rare accumulation of talent into context — in 1996, there were 41 future Hall of Famers active among MLB’s then-28 teams. The Braves had 15% of them.

Braves fans with enough history know the painful truth that accompanies the team’s seven-year stretch with a quintet of Hall of Famers that included back-to-back seasons with a sextet.

Those seven years all produced National League East titles, part of an unprecedented run of 14 in a row, and two NL pennants in 1996 and ’99. But the group was unable to deliver a second (or third) World Series title to follow the 1995 world championship. They lost both World Series to the Yankees, who had their own cache of Hall-of-Famers-to-be.

“We built teams to win championships,” Jones said. “Obviously, we didn’t win that many championships, but we won our division every single year for 14 straight (years). And that’s what we built up.”

The collection of genius-level ability provided Braves fans with a rarity that few fan bases have ever enjoyed. With a ticket to a game at Turner Field or the television tuned in to watch the team on TBS, chances are that they could see three or possibly four (if Glavine, Maddux or Smoltz was pitching) of the top 1-2% of players ever to reach the majors competing for their team.