Evolved but the same

Cox has managed to adapt without changing

By Steve Hummer

Cox Newspapers

ATLANTA -- The 1968 New York Yankees were as confused as the times. They were a dynasty in name only, four years removed from their last World Series appearance and eight years from their next.

Mickey Mantle was a .237-hitting first baseman in his farewell season. Rocky Colavito, once a power-hitting great in Cleveland, was a bit player in New York by then, even pitching two innings as an emergency reliever. And 27-year-old Bobby Cox was a rookie, summoned to the big leagues to keep third base warm for a year.

Cox's career would go on to possess the kind of heft that is earned only over a long and challenging period. It has spanned eras, enduring baseball's transition from innocence to cynicism, from make-believe to Moneyball.

The ability to remain fairly fixed and constant throughout it all -- the one true secret to Cox's longevity -- was there from his beginnings.

For ever so briefly that season of '68, he intersected with a legend still in the making, one who would be a test case for Cox's now famous patience and loyalty.

Jim Bouton would move on from those Yankees to the expansion Seattle Pilots and collect his experiences on both teams in one of baseball's indispensable books, 1970's "Ball Four." Bouton dared to expose baseball players as less than infallible idols who drank only milk and spent road trips thumbing through the Bibles in their rooms.

By today's tell-all standards, "Ball Four" was fairly mild. But as Cox remembered, "Nobody liked (Bouton). In those days, what was said in the clubhouse stayed in the clubhouse. It was the unwritten rule -- you respected your fellow teammates. That has changed, obviously."

Baseball can have a peculiar sense of humor.

In 1978, his first season as a big-league manager, Cox found himself with perhaps the only team and the only owner willing to give the controversial knuckleballer another chance to pitch -- eight years after his last major league start.

Leave it to Ted Turner to reel Bouton up from the minors. The baseball establishment howled. Critics considered it a tawdry publicity stunt coming toward the end of another losing season in Atlanta.

Nevertheless, Bouton was one of Cox's guys.

And being one his players, then as now, meant you were OK by him. It has been that way from the start.

"Bobby was great, very decent to me," said Bouton, who in five starts with those Braves was 1-3 with a 4.97 ERA. "I never felt a cold shoulder or anything like that."

Even now, when the 69-year-old manager talks about Bouton -- his pitcher, not the writer who tiptoed around old baseball taboos to which Cox still adheres -- it is in the supportive tone always taken in public with his guys.

"(Bouton) was legit," Cox said. "He could actually win a game."

Being the guy who can claim to have both played with and managed a famous author is one of the lesser footnotes of Cox's long baseball journey.

Able to adapt

Telling far more sordid truths, Jose Canseco is the whistle-blower these days. Bouton, living in Massachusetts, is reshaping "Ball Four" into a musical.

When Cox retires, the Braves dugout will lose a living witness to the inevitable mutations of baseball, a handy historical reference and a dogged baseball survivor, all in one convenient package.

Pregame most days, you can find Cox calling up the local weather radar on his iPhone, getting an up-to-date, accurate picture on the prospects of a rain delay. Yet he can attest to a time when the manager got all his weather info through sporadic phone calls to the nearest airport control tower.

He will insist that Mantle wasn't physically shot in '68 -- he was just "kind of bored. We were a .500 team; all the greats were gone except him. It was time to go. He could still run and hit balls a mile."

Cox will speak of changes he has seen overtake the game. Highly paid players are guarding their bodies like the sentries at Fort Knox guard the gold; 40 years ago, players would keep their injuries to themselves rather than go on the disabled list.

Plate umpires -- a popular topic for the manager ejected from a historic number of games (155 and counting) -- used to speed the game along with their interpretation of the strike zone, Cox noted. Now they are judged by lasers and superimposed strike zones on the tube and are calling the game much tighter. Consequently, he said, pitch counts go up and bullpens are more in play than ever.

Tellingly, what Cox never has said is how much better things used to be. He had not fallen into that trap that snags so many men of a certain age, ultimately robbing them of their ability to adapt to a changing environment.

In Cox's view, the furniture of baseball may have been rearranged, but the foundation is unchanging. No other view would have allowed him to work so effectively for so long, turning the volatile profession of managing into a lifetime gig.

Thus, he can absolutely hate the idea of a modern showy celebration after a walk-off home run, and its consequences (see California's Kendry Morales and his fractured leg), but still love the walk-off home run itself. Certainly, he has had to evolve some.

Chipper Jones, the most veteran Brave at 16 seasons, has noted most recently a softening of his manager's personality.

"He has mellowed quite a bit over the last couple years. Especially this year," Jones said. "I don't think I've seen him outwardly laugh, hilariously, as many times as I've seen him this year. He has been so intense, an all-out baseball man for so long, it's good to see him kind of relax, let his hair down, really absorb everything the last year."

There have been other, minor compromises to the times along the way. Jones has seen a gradual relaxing of rules on uniform styling and facial hair. The rule on flip-down sunglasses gave way to wrap-around Oakleys. For a long time, he said, there was no music allowed anywhere on the Braves property. Now players can let it blare, at least within the indoor batting cage next to the clubhouse.

The basics that have defined Cox's style, however, have budged not an inch.

An even keel

Glenn Hubbard played for Cox's first Braves team in 1978, and he is coaching first base on his last one. Cox goes about a game the same way, Hubbard has noticed.

"He has always been energetic from the first pitch to the last out of the game," Hubbard said.

When Hubbard is asked about the key to Cox's career, and essentially his longevity, he often refers to an episode his first year as a Braves coach. It was June 1999, and the Braves had just absorbed a 22-1 June drubbing by Baltimore. It was the worst loss in a long Braves history of losing. They couldn't pitch, couldn't hit, couldn't field.

As Hubbard slumped in front of his locker, Cox simply passed by and told him that everything would be all right. Be all right? We're doomed, Hubbard thought. The Braves won 103 games that season.

"He had been there before," Hubbard said. "He had been in that riptide where if you splash around you get nowhere. But if you calmly swim across it, you'll be all right."

Even baseball's noted iconoclast can find little fault with the way Cox has navigated four decades of ball. Bouton looks across all those years and finds something very enduring and instructive in the way the Braves manager has gone about a career.

The contrarian author constructs a complimentary summary to such a career:

"You can't get too low when you lose or too high when you win. That's a real intelligent philosophy for sports and life. And Cox has always had that."

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