LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — While Braves fans anxiously await news from the Winter Meetings and many hope general manager Frank Wren will trade for a top-of-the-rotation starter or a slugger, he indicated Monday if a move were made, it would likely be something more modest. Perhaps a bench bat or pitching depth.
“We like our team,” Wren said. “We’re going to be young again, and we like the mix of our team. There’s a couple or three areas that we would like to fortify and improve and add depth, but if spring training were starting tomorrow, we would like our team and feel like we would do well. But there’s always room to improve.”
Asked if that meant the Braves didn’t have significant needs, Wren said, “Not a dire need. We’ve got all the positions filled, but you’re always looking to get better. You’re looking where you can improve your depth, you’re looking at even incrementally where you can improve your positions….
“But in the case of our club, I don’t see necessarily a frontline move. I see more support moves, where you’re adding a bat that can give you power off the bench, or adding to our bullpen, or adding to the depth of our rotation. I see more of those kind of moves than a big frontline move.”
Hall calls, Cox doesn't pick up: When the National Baseball Hall of Fame's chairman of the board called Bobby Cox at 8:30 a.m. Monday, Cox let it go to voicemail. The retired Braves manager had nervously awaited the call, but didn't recognize the "Oneonta" location on his caller ID and figured it was a reporter.
Seconds later, Cox or one of the friends with whom he was having coffee – Royals manager Ned Yost, Braves manager Fredi Gonzalez, and former Braves coaches Pat Corrales and Jim Guadagno – realized Oneonta was close to Cooperstown, N.Y., site of the Hall of Fame.
Cox grabbed his phone, hit the callback button, and soon got the news from chairman Jane Forbes Clark: He was elected to the Hall of Fame.
Cox, Tony La Russa and Joe Torre, three of the five winningest managers in major league history, were unanimous selections by the 16-member Expansion Era veterans committee.
The man who managed the Braves for 25 seasons and won a record 14 consecutive division titles and the first major-sports championship in Atlanta history – the 1995 World Series – will be inducted at Cooperstown on July 27. Cox called the honor “the top of the mountain.”
“I haven’t had goose bumps in a long time, and I had them this morning when I got the call from Jane,” he said a couple of hours later, after a 10 a.m. news conference on the first day of baseball’s Winter Meetings.
Cox was particularly excited to be going into the Hall of Fame not just with two other two managerial giants of his era, but almost certainly with two of his former Braves aces, Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine. Each won more than 300 games and multiple Cy Young Awards, and both are in their first year of eligibility on the writers’ ballot.
“I’m certainly going in with great company,” Cox said. “I just hope that Glav and Mad Dog (Maddux) can be on the stage with me, two guys that helped get me there. That would be the final finishing touch, going in with those two….
“It’s a huge thing, going in with Tony and Joe. They were our adversaries all those years. I’m excited about it. I’m very humbled. I can’t tell you how really humbled I am. But I’m having fun with it now. I got over the shock at 8:30.”
Braves players past and present sent congratulations via Twitter, including outfielder Jason Heyward and retired third baseman Chipper Jones. Jones called Cox his “beloved manager” in the Twitter post.
Jones, who spent his entire 19-year major league career in Atlanta and played 17 seasons for Cox, said one thing in particular that made his former manager so special.
“I just think the way he treated people,” Jones said. “He treated you like a man, he didn’t embarrass you in front of the whole world. He’d pull you aside, tell you what he thought and how he was going to do things. That’s pretty much the way it went for as long as I was there. He had to manage quite a few egos over the years.
“I think you could really tell what kind of person somebody is by how everybody speaks of him, and I’ve never heard anybody say a bad word about Bobby Cox. And I don’t think anybody ever will. They respect not only his ability to be a great manager, but his intensity, his willingness to stand up for his players. And I’d be hard pressed to believe you could find a single umpire out there to say a bad word about Bobby.”
Cox was ejected by umpires more than 130 times, an unofficial major league record.
“And I’m sure he questioned the ancestry of quite a few umps along the way,” Jones said, laughing. “But it’s just part of it. Bobby would get ejected one day and walk to the plate to exchange lineup cards the next day and be laughing and joking with the same guy he was dog-cussing the day before. It’s a quality I wish I had.”
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