Walk into the office of Braves public relations director Jim Schultz in 1995 and the first thing you would notice was a large stack of phone messages. Asked some 20 years later if he ever was able to get the pile down to a manageable size, Schultz laughed and said, “We did what we could.’’
In that world championship season, Schultz and his staff may have been the busiest in the team’s front office, a media storm that started with the worst-to-first finish in ’91. Well-liked by everyone in the organization and able to keep his cool during a time when others baseball PR directors didn’t have a problem getting in the face of a reporter publicly.
No one who was at Three Rivers Stadium in the 1991 playoffs will forget the time the Pittsburgh Pirates PR director marched into the Braves TV booth and took Skip Caray to task for criticizing the city for the lack of fans in the ballpark. But Schultz, now 71, handled the issues he had with the media behind closed doors.
He still lives in Fayetteville with his wife, Connie, and has six grandchildren with another one due in May. He works for Fayette Senior Services, driving senior citizens to medical appointments.
Schultz spent 15 years as the team’s PR chief, retiring from the Braves in 2003. He always has been a familiar face around the sports scene in Atlanta as earlier in his career he worked for the Hawks, Georgia Tech, The Westminster Schools and even moved to New York in 1979 to work for Inside Sports Magazine. Schultz actually got his start with the Braves in 1972 as an assistant to PR maven Bob Hope.
Q: How exhausting was the media?
A: When I think of '91, it was pretty crazy. As bad as the team was in the late 1980s and in 1990, there was mediocre media interest at best. But by midseason, that had all changed and we had become the biggest story in the Southeast, and by the end of the season, all of baseball. Let's just say the phone never stopped.
Q: The ’95 season didn’t get off to a good start, with the major-league players on strike a group of replacement players at spring training in West Palm Beach and then the murder of one of them. How tough was that spring?
A: It was a brutal and none of the PR directors knew what to do with getting the media guides out. We just did temporary ones and hope that they would only be temporary. But the other thing that happened, that made the replacement-player issue minor, was the death of David Shotkoski. That was horrible.
Q: Where were you when the last out of the ’95 World Series dropped into the glove of center fielder Marquis Grissom and Atlanta has its first world title?
A: I was down in the clubhouse because (assistant) Glen (Serra) and I would always go down about an inning early. We would get things ready for the media. I think we went down right before the ninth inning of that game, and I was able to catch the inning on the clubhouse TV. I will always remember Grissom circling that ball.
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