ATLANTA – His retirement put on hold for at least one more week following the Atlanta Braves’ 8-7 victory over Philadelphia on Sunday afternoon, manager Bobby Cox leaned back in his office chair deep inside Turner Field and broke into a small smile.
“I’m excited as the dickens,” said the 69-year-old Cox of the Braves returning to the National League playoffs for the first time since 2005. The Braves will open the postseason at National League West champion San Francisco on Thursday after winning the NL Wild Card in a wild fashion.
“I’m relieved at the same time. This thing was getting pretty tight. I’m glad to get this out of our system.”
It will undoubtedly take longer than whatever baseball the Braves have left in the playoffs to get Cox out of the organization’s system. Counting his time as Atlanta’s skipper between 1978 and 1981, he managed the club a grand total of 25 seasons. Fifteen of them have now produced playoff teams, including a major league record – 14 straight between 1991 and 2005. One delivered the Big Peach the 1995 world championship.
“I don’t think you’ll ever see a coaching career like his come around again in any professional sport,” said former Chattanooga Lookouts manager Phillip Wellman, who recently parted ways with the Braves organization after a total of 10 years with the club.
“Bobby Cox separated himself from other major league managers not only by how he managed games, but by the way he manages people. For years he’s been the glue holding that organization together.”
Hall ahead?
The way Cox managed games will almost certainly land him in the Hall of Fame one day. He has the fourth most wins in history, his 2,504 trailing only current St. Louis Cardinals skipper Tony LaRussa’s 2,638, John McGraw’s 2,763 and all-time leader Connie Mack’s 3,731. McGraw and Mack are already in the Hall.
Cox owns the major league record for ejections, with 158.
“Bobby’s always two, three, four steps ahead of everybody else,” Florida Marlins manager Fredi Gonzalez, a former Braves third base coach, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution last week.
“I remember he got ejected one time and as he was going back to the dugout, he gave me the squeeze sign. So we did. We squeezed. After it worked, he said, ‘I didn’t think you saw it.’ I said, ‘I didn’t think you put it on.’ It was funny.”
On another occasion, Gonzalez recalled former Brave Kelly Johnson falling into an awful slump. Cox’s solution was to tell the media that Johnson reminded him of Hall of Famer Stan Musial.
“I almost spilled my coffee,” Gonzalez said. “But all of a sudden it was like [Johnson] was hitting off a tee. He went on to win player of the week. The old gray fox. Ever since then, if I’ve had a player in a slump, I’ll tell the press, ‘He’s hitting the ball on the nose. He’s close.'”
Nice guys finish first
As the former head of media relations for the Braves, Jim Schultz worked closely with Cox nearly every day during the season in both the losing 1980s and wildly successful 1990s.
“He never put it into words, but Bobby lives by the Golden Rule,” said Schultz. “He treats everyone – from maintenance workers to clubhouse guys to security personnel to front office staff – with respect. He seems genuinely interested in people because he is. He’d rather talk about you than himself. He has that uncanny knack of making you feel important.”
A case in point is Braves employee Albert Humphreys, who mans the media elevator at Turner Field each home game.
“Oh, there’s nobody like Bobby,” he said Sunday. “Nobody’s ever been nicer to me around here than Bobby.”
Another was Schultz’s memory of Cox the husband and father during the 1990s glory years.
“When his children were young and Braves were home, he made it a point to drive them to school no matter what time he’d gotten home from the previous night’s game,” said Schultz. “Later, when Skyla was a star for her high school softball team, whether the Braves won or lost – and losing burned inside Bobby – he would always call to find out how she did before the clubhouse opened to the media.”
Wellman often witnessed that knack, especially during a stint a couple of years ago when he got to spend a couple of weeks in spring training with the big club.
“They’d called up a lot of guys to give them a taste of the major leagues,” said Wellman. “Some of them might never get there again, but Bobby made every one of those young kids felt as important as Chipper Jones.”
A moment for Cox to make Wellman feel important?
“When I got ejected in Chattanooga and it was all over the news,” said Wellman, referring to his classic “hand grenade” ejection a couple of years ago that became an instant Internet classic.
“Bobby calls me and says, ‘I love it. One of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. Send me the fine and I’ll pay it.’ And he would have, too.”
Big win for Bobby?
It’s that loyalty to those close to him that led everyone from Leo Mazzone, his former pitching coach of 16 years – “With the exception of my father, he had more influence on my life than any man in my lifetime” – to Chipper Jones – “I told him I loved him” – to gush about him in recent days.
Still, his kindness alone hasn’t won all those games and pennants.
“Show up on time, play the game right, wear your uniform the right way,” Glavine wrote in the Atlanta paper on Sunday in explaining Cox’s managing style. “If you can’t do that, then you’re probably going to have problems with anybody. Because those things were so simple and so easy to follow, it lent itself to there not being a lot of drama.”
There has been a lot of drama the past few weeks. Chipper went down in August, never to return. Martin Prado, the season’s most productive bat, followed Jones to the injured list last week. Closer Billy Wagner began pitching his age (38).
Yet Cox held firm, remaining calm and confident.
“We’ve never quit trying,” he said on Sunday. “This is the hardest-working team I’ve ever coached. They’ve really been fun to manage.”
Now he’ll manage at least one more playoff series, not the Braves want it to end that soon.
“We’re going to try to win the World Series,” said pitcher Billy Wagner, who closed Sunday’s win. “That’s what Bobby deserves.”