In the Time of Bobby Cox: The Atlanta Braves, Their Manager, My Couch, Two Decades, and Me

A noted sports commentator offers a fan's chronicle of the Atlanta Braves baseball team under the management of Bobby Cox and describes the lessons he has learned during the 20 years that Cox--who retired at the end of the 2010 season--managed the highly successful team. 40,000 first printing.

INTRODUCTION
Sundays with Bobby

I’m worried. I’m really, really worried. It is a balmy Wednesday night toward the end of July 2007. My wife is asleep. I am with my dog, Starbury, in my apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The window is open, but the curtains are drawn; the apartment is dark, and I am sitting on the left side of the couch, same spot as always, my bare feet resting on the IKEA coffee table with the gently warped top exactly where my wife doesn’t like me to rest my feet because it’s also where we place our dinner plates.

The Atlanta Braves are on my TV. The Braves are almost always on my TV. If I’m home during the baseball season, I’m watching the Braves play. If I’m not home when they’re playing, I’m recording the game so I can watch it later.

I especially love it when the Braves go out West. The games start late at night, East Coast time. I can put my wife to bed, then crash out on the couch and watch until the wee hours of the night. Tonight, for instance, the Braves are playing the Giants out in San Fran at whatever the current name of their park is, the one with the bay beyond right field. First pitch is around 10:05 p.m. in New York, which means the game won’t end until close to 1:00 a.m. Tonight’s game has a nominal national relevance, because Barry Bonds is only three home runs away from breaking Hank Aaron’s all-time career record, though I’m past caring about that, and so, seemingly, is the rest of the country. I guess one of the side effects of the steroid era is public ambivalence. What matters to me tonight is that the Braves are 3 games back of the New York Mets with about 50 games left to play. And, like I said, I’m worried. I’m really, really worried.

Our first basemen have combined to post the worst batting average at any position in the major leagues. Will Jarrod Saltalamacchia or Brian McCann get the start behind the plate tonight? Has McCann’s left ring finger healed completely? Willie Harris is no Willie Mays, but he’s still been slumping lately; we need him to get going again. We should trade Salty, right? Andruw Jones is down to about one home run a week and is again starting to lose his balance at the plate. Has hitting coach Terry Pendleton noticed this yet? If not, why not? It’s taken nearly two decades, but I’ve finally started to come around on Chipper Jones; the guy can flat-out hit. The back end of our rotation is beginning to stabilize, and lefty rookie Jo-Jo Reyes has me intrigued. The bullpen, though, is a disaster; I hate to say that it reminds me a little bit of last season’s pen, but they’re heading in that direction. Something’s wrong with reliever Rafael Soriano, but I can’t quite put my finger on what. I’m afraid thirty-eight-year-old Bob Wickman is too fat but doesn’t realize it. Pete Moylan, currently our best middle reliever, was previously a pharmaceutical salesman in Australia.

These issues are representative of the things that haunt me on a day-to-day basis between March and October every year. But I’m a reasonable person, and I’m willing to endure some anxiety. Look, the platoons in left field and at second base are unconventional but they’re working, and demoting Chad Paronto from the role of designated ground ball pitcher was smart. I’d been suggesting all of these moves to Bobby Cox for weeks, and now that they’re working, I hope he realizes that these were originally my ideas. Right now Bobby and I are getting along great, perhaps the best we’ve gotten along in many years.

Except for the Chris Woodward situation. For the last two weeks, Woodward, our utility infielder, has been slumping. He has been no help to the Atlanta Braves lately. To my Atlanta Braves. Hey, maybe Woodward will come back around. I hope Woodward can get it going again, and perhaps it’s just going to take playing time for that to happen. That seems to be the way Bobby is approaching this. In the meantime, it’s killing me. Honestly, I’ve got heartburn from this.

I understand that sports fans can be partially (if not fully) obsessive. That is part of the deal; a component of the pact that comes along with being a supporter of any team. We feel like we have to be constantly on guard, lest some horrible evil befall our franchise. And, in turn, fall on us. Not to the Braves. Not on my watch.

The thing is, I care vigilantly about every member of the franchise, from the players to the coaches to the front office staff. If the Braves announce the hiring of someone as trivial as a new travel secretary, I will immediately Google him and comb through his work history, looking for gaps in the résumé, as if I’d been charged with hiring him to begin with. Baseball teams often off-load aging players in exchange for younger prospects. Whenever the Braves bring in young guys, I study every bit of information available. They may never set foot on a major league field, but I want and need to know them inside and out. If I don’t care, who will? You can’t have a championship organization without having first-class people.

So I guess you could say that regarding Chris Woodward, Bobby and I seem to be at an impasse.

But it keeps us going.

Some of us learn from history, some of us from books, some of us from our families, some of us never learn. The thing is, lessons are all around us, just waiting to be absorbed. It’s all about where you look to learn. Even if you’re not really looking to learn.

During the mid-to-late 1990s, when my friend Matt and I were in our early twenties, we watched The Jerry Springer Show every afternoon. Our daily schedule involved watching Springer and then playing Madden for a few hours. Then fast food for dinner. Then sports on TV. Then Madden again before bed. I will allow that we probably could have been more productive members of society. I like to think that we were pacing ourselves.

For a while there, everything in our lives revolved around Springer. We mostly appreciated the sheer inanity of it all. We’d tune in and then sit sipping from our cans of Mountain Dew, and we’d cheer for these poor, sad people who were perhaps irrationally afraid of zippers, or maybe suspicious they had been impregnated by a goat in their sleep. These guests would confront their issues on national television, speak about them calmly and rationally, begin yelling at another guest, and then, unpredictably but reliably, a brawl would break out.

The Jerry Springer Show was billed as a reflection of a larger slice of society than television had ever shown us before, a fascinating, sometimes disturbing look deep into the fringes of our culture. People relegated to the American moral minority, the sort of folk who were serially engaged in things like promiscuity, deceitfulness, drug abuse, prejudice, and crime—usually simultaneously—were suddenly revealed to the rest of us. And we, the people, embraced them. Springer was terribly popular: by 1998, it was averaging around seven million viewers per episode.

Being able to identify myself as a Springer viewer was like being in a biker gang or getting a tattoo: it was about as badass as I could get. Living in the Bible Belt, the son of Southern Baptists, I could only rebel stealthily. I didn’t drink, mostly hung around the apartment, and lived by the old Southern adage “Don’t smoke, don’t chew, and don’t go with girls who do.” But if watching a TV show could guarantee me entrée into a new social class, that much I could handle. Maybe watching Springer didn’t make me “cool,” but it certainly identified me as someone who wasn’t afraid to watch imbeciles fight.

I came to Jerry Springer something of a moralist who believed that because of my lifestyle, I was clearly a better person than those who did not live the way I did, a group that included pretty much every person involved with The Jerry Springer Show. But watching Springer made me more forgiving of those living alternative or nontraditional lifestyles. I often felt empathy, if not sympathy, for these people. Before long, I realized I wasn’t better than them, and they weren’t worse than me; we were just different. We’d been dealt different lives, and we were all just trying to make the best of what was around. Even though I’d been raised to believe that all people were equal, it took Jerry Springer to show me what that really means.

I also learned that if anyone ever invites you to Chicago to appear on a TV program because they would like to reveal something to you, you probably should ask if it wouldn’t better be handled in private. The free trip might be nice and all, but I’ve been to Chicago; having your shirt ripped off and your hair pulled out on national television definitely isn’t worth getting to stand on the concrete shores of Lake Michigan.

In other words, I learned a lot from Jerry Springer. But these days my life is mostly informed by a series of principles I have fortuitously extracted from Atlanta Braves manager Bobby Cox, who couldn’t be more opposite from Jerry Springer if he tried to be.

Sports fans seem to know about Bobby Cox in an especially general sense: Braves manager for over two decades, fourthwinningest manager in the history of Major League Baseball, once was involved in an unsavory domestic dispute, gets thrown out of games often. Beyond that, and despite his undeniable success, Bobby Cox remains something of a mystery to many sports fans, even dedicated baseball fans. To begin with, the national media don’t pay him much mind, and Cox seems to prefer it that way. He doesn’t endorse any products. He refuses to do those in-game interviews during nationally televised games. He’s never released an autobiog...