By Steve Hummer
Cox Newspapers
LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — It has been 50 years since Bobby Cox first came to Florida, dressed up in a major league uniform and slowly warmed to the task of a baseball season. Fifty years. Gone in a flash.
In 1960, Cox was an 18-year-old farmhand for the Dodgers, a team that had just recently moved to Los Angeles. The second time he ever flew on a plane, it was aboard a prop job bound for Vero Beach, Fla., from California. He swears the plane stopped twice to refuel.
At the team’s Dodgertown spring complex, the aspiring infielder slept in the barracks left over from the property’s days as a World War II naval air base. And he grew up fast in the company of roughneck veterans in no mood to embrace a rookie.