A baseball, tears and Ole No. 6

"To Letha, Best Wishes Bobby Cox"

Bobby Cox died yesterday.  He was 84. Why do we always give the age without thinking? I guess the age is the point to the living.

I probably watched or listened to Bobby Cox manage close to 2,000 ballgames in my life. That number spans generations. My grandfather (who I called Pop) watched him. I watched him. The Atlanta Braves on TBS were the family's nightly summer entertainment long before I had any say in the matter. As long as MASH or The Waltons weren't on or the score wasn't too lopsided, we were watching the Braves. 

My mother was the baseball fan in the house. That's where I got it. Dad understood it. But he was more into horses and rodeos. Pop loved to watch Cox argue with umpires and get tossed. He would shake with laughter. It was comical to him. He'd start out with saying "Oh, now Bobby," to the TV set and then start rolling.

I know what it was now. That hard-nosed, absolute refusal to let a possible bad call slide. You fight for your people. You say your piece. You take the consequence without complaint and you write the check. Cox held the all-time record for ejections and his teams had a losing record for many of those seasons but that was never the point. The point was standing up for your team and your players. Fight for everything. An umpire who got something wrong in Bobby's eyes was going to hear about it. Period.

His hard-nosed fire and fierce commitment to his players is old school. When it comes to baseball I'm old school, mostly. I never liked the designated hitter. Pitchers should bat their position. You don't step on the foul line chalk leaving or entering the field of play. You wear metal cleats. The mound should be six inches higher like it was in 1968.

That was Bobby. I missed him before he was dead. Now he's gone.

He handled baseball's changing rules well as a manager.  He won with and without the designated hitter, for example. He knew how to get the most out of players and he knew what his players were best at, using them accordingly. Sabermetrics did not always predicate the manager's next move. He still would go with his gut in a pinch. 

He was the last manager in baseball who wore actual metal cleats in the dugout just like any player on the field. He said he was just more comfortable that way. That's the whole biography right there.

But he proved he could adapt and manage the game however they changed it, because the game is still the game. You still have to hit the ball, catch the ball, and pitch the ball. Game by game. Bobby understood that better than anyone.

I wrote about him in 2010 — his final season. I followed that Wild Card chase with a particular kind of attention because I knew it was ending. Jennifer and I were at Turner Field on October 3rd when the Braves clinched the Wild Card in Cox's last regular season game. The crowd chanted Bob-bee, Bob-bee. And when the San Francisco Giants eliminated them in four games — all one-run ballgames — and the Turner Field crowd chanted his name again, something remarkable happened. The Giants stopped celebrating on the field and applauded the opposing team's manager. That's class. I wrote at the time that I wasn't sure anything like that had ever happened before.

I choose not to remember Bobby Cox tipping his cap in that final defeat. I choose to remember the earlier photograph from the sports page I scanned and posted that night — Bobby on the shoulders of his players after the Wild Card clincher, right hand raised like the Pope giving a blessing, champagne arcing over his head. Elated. Punching the air.

He has cleats on.

14 straight division titles. Five National League pennants. The 1995 World Series. 2,504 wins, fourth all-time. Hall of Fame, 2014. He had a stroke in 2019 and kept coming around, kept showing up at the ballpark, still asking Braves managers about young pitchers as recently as last season. Still watching the game, thinking the game.

Ted Turner died three days ago. He was 87. Turner, a wild-assed maverick with a gift for money, bought the Braves in 1976 and put them on his superstation. They were his prime time competition in the world of television entertainment. The Braves against all the top rated shows. Which is how they ended up in our living room, like living rooms across the South every summer night for a couple of decades. I watched regularly as a student and post-graduate life in Athens.

Turner hired Cox in 1978, making him the youngest manager in the National League. He fired him in 1981. Bobby actually came to his own firing press conference and sat next to Ted as he sold it to everybody. Asked what type of manager he was looking for Ted didn't hesitate, of course he rarely did, and said: "It would be Bobby Cox if I hadn't just fired him. We need someone like him around here." 

Then he hired him back. Twice. After Cox had a successful stint in Toronto, taking a losing ballclub to its first division title ever, Turner hired him as Atlanta's general manager. It wasn't Bobby's cup of tea but he knew baseball and eventually arranged things as he wanted them.

Back to the dugout in 1990, hired as manager. That was the last season the Braves would suck for a very long time in MLB terms. The dynasty followed. Maddux, Glavine, Smoltz, Chipper, Andruw Jones. It was a rare alignment of talent, skill, and managership. Bobby did his part, no question.

I associate summer nights with watching the Braves play ball. Though I do not watch them as much anymore, I do catch many of their games on the radio, just like when I first became a fan in the late 1960's. Nine years old and falling asleep listening to a Braves game. Thinking it was kind of a rebellious thing for me to do. The Braves were parts of summer nights for a long time in my life.

I got out my baseball memorabilia. Odds and ends of the Braves through the years. My mother ran into Bobby Cox after his retirement, at a local grocery store of all places. Cox lived less than 30 miles from Twin Oaks. Somehow a baseball was produced. Mom probably wasn't carrying one in her purse. I don't know if he had it on him or how it happened exactly, the way these chance encounters work. He signed it for her. "To Letha: Best Wishes. Bobby Cox."

Since her passing I've kept that ball. I looked at it yesterday and was struck by a sudden rush of all those games, my youth, my mother now dead, Bobby Cox now dead, all that joy and disappointment through all those long years, gone. It was all too much and out of nowhere I teared up and cried. It has been awhile since I cried over anything. Felt good. Everyone benefits from crying now and then, I think.

But mostly it was the handwriting. The physical there-ness of it. Bobby Cox's handwriting, to my mother, by name. On this ball in my hand.

In that moment, time and place collided in me on different levels and I remembered the joy. 1991 was so sweet. 1995 was especially sweet. All those years of all those wins were my years too. My years of watching Cox manage the Braves on TV. We could have had more, but that's baseball. Batter up!

[See a nice, brief tribute here.]

Me watching the last game in Turner Field.