For Bobby Cox, work still the joy of his life

He wheeled into the gated parking lot back by the Turner Field loading dock shortly after 10 a.m. a week ago, a full nine hours before Colorado pitcher Ubaldo Jimenez began smothering the Braves. Cox didn’t get back to his Marietta digs until around midnight. And he wasn’t exactly in the mood to slip gently into dreamland.

Maybe he would have slept in that morning had he known his team would play the foil for the first no-hitter in Rockies’ history. But it always has been a trademark of this manager to get to the yard before the first pot of clubhouse coffee has been brewed. That’s true regardless of what might have unfolded the night before, be it suffering the worst kind of loss or celebrating some Jason Heyward-inspired, two-out-in-the-ninth comeback.

That is baseball to Cox: Another day, another seduction.

That’s true on the road: “I’d rather be at the ballpark than sitting inside a hotel room, personally,” Cox said. “Other guys don’t feel that way. Fine.”

And at home, where Cox wakes up antsy to get to the office: “Within 10 minutes of waking up, it seems, he is out the door,” said Cox’s wife, Pam. “I told him the other day, ‘You know what they should put on your headstone?: I Got to Get To the Ballpark.’ ”

Shoot, in his first managing gig, the Fort Lauderdale Yankees back in 1971, he didn’t even pretend to have another home. He slept in his tiny office at the Class A park. So long as Cox had the keys to a stadium, he’d never be homeless.

He is almost 70 years old and still, whenever he dares to stroll into the clubhouse as late as noon for a night game, “We joke with him, ‘What are you keeping, banker’s hours?’ ” said Chris Van Zant, the Braves assistant clubhouse and travel manager.

Thus, when Pam left last weekend to visit with grandkids at the couple’s farm near Adairsville, it meant one thing to Bobby: “That always gives me the opportunity to get here earlier,” he said, speaking from the ballpark, naturally.

A ballpark junkie

Almost 70 years old and he still is like a kid who can’t wait to get into uniform before a Little League game. He gets to the park and immediately assumes the look.

“He’ll come in and eat lunch in pair of game pants. He’s ready to go,” Van Zant said. And the game isn’t for seven hours yet. (And though traction isn’t an issue in the dugout, he wears spikes during a game).

Once at the park, there is plenty of work to be done, especially before the first game of any series. That’s when Cox and his coaching staff lay the groundwork for the opponent in various meetings. He also holds a brief full team meeting — usually around 20 minutes — to set the tone for the series and to allow the players to add their input.

Still, the prep work alone can’t account for the long hours, especially on the back end of a series. Cox could be far more time-efficient detailing an upcoming game; other managers are. But then he would be denying himself the pleasure of time spent in his favorite corner of the world, among the people he enjoys most.

If Cox can’t relax in a setting of his own making — whether it’s going over stats in his office, or just killing time watching the Golf Channel or old game replays on the MLB Network — then who else can?

“You try to create a good environment where the players want to come so they can enjoy it. This game is hard enough,” he said.

Setting an upbeat tone

Cox says he tries to balance a relaxed approach against the imperative to produce. Bobby Dews, the 71-year-old coach who has been in the organization since the mid-1970s, says he somehow makes it work. “It’s demanding, but you never feel the pressure of the demand. That’s magic.”

It’s the sort of working environment that has made a cliché of every new player’s exultation of how much he’s always wanted to play for Cox. Just as telling are the unheard testimonials of the people who do the grunt work of baseball.

When Fred Stone, an assistant clubhouse manager with 27 major league years with the Braves, was considering getting his knees replaced, he didn’t go ahead with the surgery until after several long talks with the manager, who is working on a store-bought pair himself. “He’s always there for you if you need to talk,” Stone said.

Van Zant has grown up with Cox and the Braves. He was a bat boy in 1990; now he is the father of three. One of his two sons bears the middle name Robert. Who names their kid after their boss?

Van Zant marvels most at Cox’s boundless love for what he does, an attitude that can spread through a clubhouse almost as quickly as a good trade rumor. “He has a spring in his step — there might be a hitch in it, but it’s still a spring,” he said.

“That spring he has every day — mid-February, mid-June, mid-September it’s there, that eternal optimism we’re going to win that day and the next day. I enjoy every day at this park and part of it is because of him. He’s the No. 1 reason why I work here.”

A place to hold court

A daily scene before home games underscores Cox’s easygoing manner at the park. It takes place in a little room, maybe 9 by 9 feet, just down the steps from the Braves dugout.

The room was built as a video replay area, a place players could duck into right after each at-bat to check out their swings. Within a week, Cox had the video equipment removed. His guys began rushing down there after strikeouts, replaying the sequence and then emerging to scream at the ump.

“I couldn’t have that,” said the manager, who holds the all-time record for ejections by umpires.

Call it the Kenny Lofton Room — the former outfielder was one of the leading offenders. Now the cubbyhole serves as a retreat for Cox, where he can smoke a cigar, watch a little TV and creatively dally.

A sign over the door reads, “No Media Beyond This Point.” Media go beyond that point all the time. Cox will spend an hour or more in that bunker, just relaxing. A cooler filled with roasted peanuts is there for plundering. Mark Lemke, one of Cox’s favorite former players who does some Braves radio work, is a fixture in there, a partner in conversation that drifts between baseball and the real world.

“If I just pounded him with baseball questions, I probably wouldn’t be welcome,” Lemke said.

To see Cox so comfortable in this place makes it easier to believe his claim that there never has been a day, not one, when he has thought, “I don’t feel like going to work.”

Cox is the son of a California well-digger who rigged his truck with a speaker in the back so he could listen to baseball while laying pipe. Cox knows he has been one of the fortunate ones, to have a ballpark as a workplace. “I get fan mail from guys all the time telling me I’ve been so lucky to have something I love to do all my life. Yes, I’m lucky,” he said.

Not going ‘cold turkey’

Conversely, he is one of those guys to whom retirement looms as a threat, the end of one of the great top-down rides of all time. How do you suddenly wring the ballpark out of the man? With what will he replace all those hours spent in the perfect company of baseball?

Cox said he will adapt, just as he adapted to the vagaries of each season. And he’ll still make the rounds, venturing out to the Braves’ minor league parks as well as Turner Field.

“I’ll be fine, as long as I’m connected a little bit,” he said. “Going cold turkey would be tough, like [former Reds and Tigers manager] Sparky [Anderson] and those guys. He just quit. [Former Orioles manager] Earl [Weaver], too. I don’t know how they did that.”

Still, those close to him have to wonder about how a baseball man of nearly five decades, a manager for nearly four, will function in a life not driven by the desire to be at the ballpark nor defined by that day’s result.

“When he first announced that he was going to retire,” said his wife, “I was so excited. But now, there is the sense of what are we going to do [afterward]?”

She laughingly confessed that her buddies have suggested setting up a Web site for a group called FOP (Friends of Pam). “And on it would be a suggestion box called ‘What Am I Going to Do With Bobby?’ ” Pam said.

For now, she figures, better to concentrate on the moment. “I want him to have a good season so badly — I just want one more.”

Better to invest in these last long days at the yard and the belief they might produce a closing gust of glory. One that might lift Cox more easily into the unknown that waits on the other side of the outfield wall.