About 15 feet down from the plaques commemorating Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb and Honus Wagner in the Hall of Fame rotunda are six blank backings where the bronze from the Class of 2014 will be bolted.
They are just two alcoves over. Or as soon-to-be inductee Bobby Cox said, “Pretty close to the high-income boys.”
Coming to grips with his own piece of baseball immortality was a lot to take in for the former Braves manager and he was glad to have some help Monday at the Baseball Hall of Fame. He and former Brave Greg Maddux came to Cooperstown, N.Y., together for a day of orientation in advance of their July 27th induction.
Of the rest of the Class of 2014, Tom Glavine and Frank Thomas have already been. Joe Torre and Tony La Russa are yet to visit.
“It’s starting to hit home right now for me for the first time,” Cox said. “How much this means to a person that spent their entire life in the game of baseball, to realize that this is the top of the hill.”
Monday’s two-hour tour wasn’t so much to review the lay of the land as it was a chance to process. Cox and Maddux did that together, with their wives, several Hall officials and a half-dozen media types, while they learned a little more about baseball history and, in turn, shared some of their own.
“I’ll be darned” Cox said, looking at the pair of flip-down sunglasses bolted into a Wagner baseball cap, which Erik Strohl, vice president of exhibitions and collections, pointed out during the first part of the tour. Cox was always a stickler for proper dress and insisted his players wear flip-down sunglasses instead of Oakley’s during the early part of his managerial career.
Maddux brought up shades of his own past — and acknowledged his reputation for being a little crude — when asked to don a pair of white gloves to handle items from the vault. Some of the baseballs from Maddux’s milestone starts are a part of the behind-the-scenes collection of the Hall’s most prized pieces.
“I wasn’t too sanitary back then,” Maddux said without missing a beat as he gloved up to handle the glove Rube Waddell used to pitch in his 20-inning complete game loss to Cy Young in 1905. “That’s a tough loss right there.”
Both Maddux and Cox got to spin a Ruth bat around in their hands.
“Look at the cleat marks,” Cox said.
“That’s why you turn it over,” said Maddux, demonstrating how he used to flip his bat handle down to kick the dirt off his cleats.
Maddux reached out to touch the left sleeve of Pete Alexander’s 1926 World Series jersey, wondering aloud what the stains were from.
“He was a right-hander,” Cox said of one of the only seven pitchers to win more games than Maddux. “He kept doing this,” demonstrating how Alexander would have wiped his pitching hand on his left shoulder.
Strohl handed Maddux the ball from his 15th win in his 15th consecutive season, a record Maddux would extend to 17 consecutive seasons with 15 or more wins.
“See, not a scratch on it,” Maddux said. “Everybody thinks I scuffed.”
Together Cox and Maddux got to see displays and artifacts celebrating more than 150 years of the game’s history, including the one that mattered most to the two of them — the 1995 World Series. When they approached that display case, Maddux pulled out his phone to snap a picture, saying he wanted to get one from “when Smoltzie had hair.”
They looked at photos of young Braves pitchers John Smoltz and Glavine. They saw Glavine’s spikes from Game 6, the 1-0 clinching victory, and got to handle the bat David Justice used to hit the game-winning home run. Maddux talked about playing golf recently with Justice, telling Cox just how far Justice could hit the ball. As for one he hit in 1995?
“Nice of him to get that hit, wasn’t it?” said Maddux, always understated.
“Just made it out,” Cox said.
Cox spent a lot of time lingering over exhibits featuring Yankees, the team that signed him out of Selma, Calif., promoted him to the majors and eventually gave him his first job as a minor league manager.
Standing in front of Lou Gehrig’s old locker, Cox told Maddux a story of seeing Joe DiMaggio in the Yankees clubhouse one day in 1968 and asking clubhouse manager Pete Sheehy if he thought DiMaggio would mind if Cox took a picture with him. Ten minutes later, Sheehy came back and told Cox that DiMaggio wanted to take a picture with him.
"He wanted to take a picture with me?" Cox said.
When they came to one of Hank Aaron’s displays, Maddux told Cox about watching TV with his family on a U.S. Air Force base in Spain, when the show was interrupted by a cut-in of Aaron’s 715th home run.
A big deal?
“I was 10 years old,” Maddux said. “I liked the Reds.”
That was a lesson his wife Kathy said she learned fast when she first met her husband at age 15. They were sweethearts at Valley High in Las Vegas.
“I really knew nothing about sports,” Kathy Maddux said while strolling between exhibits. “My dad liked the Dodgers, so I was like, ‘Oh yeah, Dodgers.’ And he was like, ‘We hate the Dodgers in this house!’ I think that’s the maddest I’ve ever seen him.”
Maddux spent some of his youth in southern Indiana, raised in a baseball family. His father Dave pitched in high school. His brother Mike, a former major league pitcher, is now the pitching coach for Texas.
Mike was on Maddux’s mind when the tour took them into the archives library, home to some 20,000 files on major league players, broadcasters, owners, executives and umpires. Maddux wanted to see his brother’s file.
Thumbing through its contents, Maddux found a 1993 clipping from the Albany (N.Y.) Times with a headline: “Mets get Mike (not Greg) Maddux.”
“Blow that up and give him that one for Christmas,” said Maddux, snapping a photo as he laughed.
Maddux, who works for the Rangers as a special assistant and pitching instructor, has invited his brother, his father and his son to play golf with him in Cooperstown the day before the induction.
It was hardly golf weather on Monday, with temperatures in the teens off Lake Otsego when the tour started about 9 a.m. But with his induction only four months away, Maddux, like Cox, is starting to warm up to the idea.
“Being around spring training for the last month, you hear, ‘Hall of Famer this and that’ and it starts to sink in a little bit,” Maddux said. “But today, it’s hitting pretty hard.”
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