At once, there is only one way to begin this diary, and there are 162 ways.
I could tell you about when I was 9 years old, a boy trying to grow up in Northern Virginia, and my father introduced me to baseball at a time when I needed something positive in my life far more than I needed oxygen in my lungs.
I could tell you about kneeling in brief prayer after the last game of the 1995 playoffs, 483 miles from home but right back on the couch, with my father, watching my team.
I could tell you about the end of the run and this last farewell to a few very good men.
I debated beginning this with a video of one of the two moments that cemented this man and his team in my heart ... 19 years ago.
I don't know how to begin because I've spent 19 years doing what I do and watching this man do what he does, and now I have to do what I do without him and about him.
And if I do it, that makes it real.
In the 1950s, the Atlanta Braves were the Milwaukee Braves (having moved from Boston), and they were powerfully good. "Spahn and Sain" and pray for rain, the saying has been in Boston, because Warren Spahn and Johnny Sain went 8-0 in 12 days. In Milwaukee, Sain was no longer with the team, but they still had Eddie Mathews (the only man to play for one team in three cities), and they had a young former Negro League slugger who would go on to some records and stuff. Also in Milwaukee, they'd win a World Series and lose another, both times playing the Yankees.
My father, who was born in 1958, started following the team for reasons he'll remind me of when I e-mail him the link to this, but what's important is that from the 1960s until the second half of the 1991 season, the Braves did practically nothing. They were the Detroit Lions of MLB. They'd done well in fits and spurts, but if you were watching a Braves game, you were probably watching the other team win.
For whatever reason, I started paying attention to sports in 1991, when I was 9.
When you are 9, your father's baseball team is the best in the world even if it is horrible. Every bad thing that happens is the umpire's fault -- every strikeout is a bad call, every groundout is the fielder cheating, every popup is the pitcher throwing spitters. I was genuinely disappointed every time a Braves pitcher didn't throw a perfect game because this was my father's team! They didn't make mistakes!
Starting in May or so of that year, I began to notice a hefty man, kind of old compared to the other players, walk out onto the field once or twice a game. Sometimes he'd go out to talk to the pitcher, sometimes he'd go out to replace the pitcher, and sometimes he'd go out to tell the umpire what was wrong.
And sometimes, when he did that, he'd get thrown out of the game.
It was spectacular! He understood how I felt! Oh, how I yelled at the umpires for blowing so many calls! My father was just as angry, too, because if you think John McEnroe was mad at the judges in tennis who kept blowing obvious calls, you don't know mad. Bobby Cox -- he was always Bobby Cox, not Bobby, not Mr. Cox but Bobby Cox -- would get thrown out of a game about every month. He stuck up for his guys. He stuck up for what was right.
He stuck up for me.
At the All-Star break in 1991, the Braves were in second place in the National League West by 9.5 games. I was in the backyard with my father doing nothing in particular, and I told him the Braves were going to win the division.
"They're nine and a half games out, dear," he said, smiling slightly and shaking his head, with the patience of a leadoff hitter. "I don't think so."
"But they will," I protested earnestly. "They're going to come back."
Of course they were going to come back. They had Bobby Cox! And David Justice, who was on the disabled list, had swung a bat the other day! He was going to come back, and Sid Bream was going to come back, and Ronnie Gant and Lonnie Smith and ... they were going to win!
Unbeknownst to me, the Los Angeles Dodgers were managed by an equally cunning man named Tommy Lasorda, who had his own crew of dream (and baseball) crushers. The Dodgers were not exactly new to this baseball thing, but to my 9-year-old self, it really didn't matter who "The Dodgers" were, only that they were not my Braves and so they were eventually simply not going to win. It was amazingly simple -- somehow, the Braves were going to win because. (They were also the best because. Life is a lot simpler when you are 9 and it's summer vacation.)
A lot of the games the Braves played that year were on the road, which meant late start times and also meant I got to watch the first several innings and then got woken up each morning by my father, who learned right quick once my obsession developed that if he didn't tell me who'd won the game last night, he'd be out of a Washington Post Sports Section until I'd found out how the Braves had done and how The Dodgers had done.
The Braves had sort of meandered into the All-Star break, a respectable-for-them 39-40, but they were going to have to really turn things around if they were going to beat The Dodgers, who were 9.5 games up -- which didn't seem like that big of a number considering they'd played 80 games. Making up 9.5 games in 82 was just picking up every ninth game, which meant that if the umpires stopped helping the other team, the Braves would win out and The Dodgers would quit to play some other sport, or whatever teams did when the season was over, like do commercial spots or play catch with their fathers.
From that point on, I have three significant nonchronological memories of the second half of the 1991 season:
- I believe it was Pete van Wieren who at one point noted that the Braves were now only 6.5 games out of first, which was proof positive that the umpires had stopped being so mean to the Braves (my father was still not convinced).
- The Braves played The Dodgers at one point and won the first game of the series to climb to within five games, then lost the second to lose that ground back, then won the third game to again get to within five games. I was sure they could have a do-over for the second game so the gap could be just four, and I'm confident my father got very tired very quickly of explaining to me that the Braves were just going to have to win the pennant another way.
- "Worst to first." I heard that phrase approximately 5,465,757 times that summer because the Braves had apparently been cheated like hell out of winning in the previous season, to the point where they were 432 games out of first, or whatever was an awfully big number. Call it 32. They were 61-91, or something, and I was very glad the umpires were being nicer this year, and I couldn't imagine how many games Bobby Cox had been ejected from the season before because the umpires were getting so much wrong.
And then, of course, there was the second-to-last game of the season. At some point in there, the Braves had won a bunch of games (it seemed like they were winning two out of three games, and -- I found out later -- they'd gone 55-28 to end the season, which is a game shy of two out of every three games) and The Dodgers now were the ones having to deal with unfair umpires, which I thought was juuuuust fine. Let us have the good umps and someone else can have the bad for a change.
I knew that game against the Astros was important, but while I understood what it meant to win the pennant, the guys on TV kept talking about clinching. I thought maybe they meant cinching, but that didn't make sense, and my father was practically melded to the TV screen at that point, so I didn't dare ask him what it meant -- even during the commercials. I didn't want to distract him in case maybe the umpires heard or something, so I just sat there trying to not even think about how Something Very Good might be about to be happening and I wanted to be there.
The Braves were hosting the Astros (which meant not dinner or going to Chuck E. Cheese's but that the Astros were playing in Atlanta, which I thought was strange because they were the Houston Astros, so why wasn't the game being played in Houston?), which meant the Braves pitched first and then the Astros pitched. After the last out of the game -- I don't remember it very well -- Atlanta's catcher ran up to the mound and jumped on and hugged Atlanta's pitcher, and my father went kind of nuts.
Well, duh, silly Daddy. Remember when I told you they'd win? You shoulda listened to me, shouldn't you? (Does this mean I get a raise in my allowance?)
I don't remember much of the NLCS except that it was against the Pirates, and they sounded tough, and they were coached by a man named Jim Leyland, and that was a really peculiar name, and I hoped the Braves weren't scared by the mascot, which looked like an honest-to-gosh pirate and everything. (I didn't really know what a brave was, but everyone who's anyone knows what a pirate is, and that thing looked like a pirate! But I wasn't scared.)
Anyhow, the Braves won that, too:
And then the Twins got the best umpires and won in seven games, and I really don't want to talk about it.
So at 9, and then newly 10 (and now newly 29), my heart was pretty thoroughly set on this team that got picked on for a lot of years, like me, and then went to the World Series -- it got better for them, so it would get better for me, right? (Took a few on that one, but I'm fairly sure none of my classmates in grade or high school has been featured on this site five dozen times ...)
A year later, the Braves were in the NLCS -- that was important, and if they won, they got to go back to the World Series, and the Twins weren't playing in it that year, and I wouldn't have to hear about Kirby Puckett every 15 darn seconds -- and I was listening to game seven in my room. (How in the world was I going to sleep with the NLCS playing? It was THE NLCS! Come on! It was important! "Paddy, go to bed!" my mother or father would say if I got too loud following an umpire blowing a call or the Braves doing something good. "I will!" I'd say just loudly enough for them to hear me, but making sure to sound very tired -- like the effort from saying it was about enough to conk me right the heck out.)
So all I got was to hear the games, but it was better than having to find out the next day. Close your eyes and just listen:
And then I did bad in school and I didn't get to watch the World Series against the Blue Jays. And the next year, the Braves lost in the NLCS to the Phillies, and the year after that, the players went on strike, and there wasn't a World Series (but the Expos -- who was supposed to be afraid of an Expo? What in the world WAS an Expo? It looked like some animal you'd see in a zoo out of a fiction book or something -- were in front at the time).
And then I was 483 miles from home, and there was no Washington Post Sports Section, so I couldn't find out how the Braves were doing every morning, and I couldn't watch TV at night or anything. But there was SportsCenter, just like at home, so I found out that way that Bobby Cox was still getting thrown out of ballgames for trying to explain to the umpires that they were still wrong, and Greg Maddux was still making the guys hit the ball any which way but hard (they said he looked like an accountant, but my Uncle Ed was an accountant, and Greg Maddux didn't look anything like Uncle Ed, so I thought they were silly and wrong -- they might have been umpires before, actually, but they'd gotten tired of Bobby Cox yelling at them, so they'd retired -- so that made sense).
But now I understood a little more about baseball. Now you didn't go to the National League Championship Series after the regular season. You went to one of two National League Division Series, and if you won that, then you went to the NLCS, and if you won that, you went back to the World Series like before.
The Braves were playing the Indians that year, and people kept talking about how it was the Braves versus the Indians like there was some sort of joke, but I didn't get it. It was the Braves versus the Indians because they'd each won their championship series. That was it. It wasn't funny, it was simple -- the teams had won their leagues, so they were playing in the World Series. (I was in some ways amazingly sheltered and in some ways thrown to the wolves. Fun way to grow up, let me tell you.)
But this time, the Braves didn't have to play the Pirates, who were a pretty awful team now. And they didn't have to play the Phillies. The Blue Jays and Twins were nowhere in sight. They beat the Rockies and the Reds to get there, and Pete and Don, the Braves' play-by-play announcers, had never said the Indians were anything to worry about, so I figured we'd have the series won in six games -- but I didn't tell anyone because that would jinx it.
Game Six was a Saturday night, which I remember because when I was at school, Saturday night was the only night where the freshmen could watch TV because there was no study hall. I went down to the Tuck Shop (which didn't sell tucks, but whatever) to watch the game, and roundabout the sixth inning, right after David Justice hit what would be the game-winning home run (the only run of the game), the quarterback of the football team came down with his girlfriend, and they didn't want to watch the game with me. Instead, they wanted to be alone.
But 'Bama (he was from Alabama, I found out midway through the high school football season) was going to let me watch the game on the condition that basically as soon as it ended, I would leave.
That was a much better deal than I was expecting. Maybe he wanted to look nice in front of his girlfriend so she'd kiss him more.
The ending of the game was ... almost disappointing -- there would be no more baseball until the spring, which was forever away. I couldn't call my father to celebrate because it was late and he had probably gone off to bed right after the game ended because he'd have to wake my brother and sisters up for school.
That was 15 years ago. But it was yesterday. And now it and the other memories -- from Andruw Jones celebrating after his walk-off walk in the NLCS probably 12 years ago against the Mets to John Smoltz bowing and removing his cap right before pitching to Greg Maddux (after Maddux had gone back to the Cubs) -- are static.
There won't be any more Bobby Cox walks to the dugout. There won't be any more blown baserunning calls or balls called as strikes prompting Bobby to walk up to whichever base, remind the umpire of in which direction to look so you have a clue what's going on in the game, followed by Bobby Cox being ejected from the game. There won't be any more shots of Bobby Cox and Leo Mazzone sitting in the dugout, with Bobby just sitting there pensive and Leo rocking the way he always does. (I went probably five or six years watching baseball games before I realized not all pitching coaches rock when they're not standing.)
The consummate players' coach has retired. Oh, he'll stay on for a few years as a consultant, but Bobby Cox the guy you grew up admiring and then holy cow you got to play for him (I was nowhere near good enough, mind) ... gone.
And in his place ... no. No. His place is his place. Someone else will come along and become the new Braves manager, and make his own place of it, but Bobby's place is his place, just as the new guy won't be filling Bobby's shoes because Bobby's shoes are his shoes.
His and nobody else's.
The new guy will have new shoes and a team of his own to manage, and Bobby will just wear his shoes somewhere else and have his memories of decades of teams and players.
Bobby Cox has for years been known as the manager everyone wants to play for. His players have cared about him and loved him for more than 20 years, and Bobby has cared and loved back. His legacy among those only passingly familiar with baseball is partly that he kept getting thrown out of ballgames. And so his goodbye as a manager is fitting.
In the Braves' last series, which ended last night, Bobby Cox was ejected from the first two games for arguing with the same umpire.
In the first game, Bobby argued that a runner who'd been called safe after trying to steal second base was in fact out.
Blown call. Obviously blown call. But that's what you get when the umpire is poorly positioned and can't see the tag being made a full half-foot before the runner hits the bag. (My favorite replay view has the runner being tagged while the base is not even in the viewing area.) So Bobby went out to advocate on behalf of his players, and as happens when you try to explain to someone that they just missed a really close play while they were picking their nose, Bobby got tossed from the game.
The next game, the umpire who'd been working second base when he missed the runner being tagged out missed a call at first case. Bobby got tossed again. What else can you do? Sit there and watch as someone gets away with doing a mediocre job? No. You get up and show your players you care about the bum rap they're getting. It's the same thing Bobby did all those years his players were winning awards and pennants and trophies and the lot of it. Bobby's job was to, among other things, be the guy who got into those arguments and got tossed from the game so his players would have time to calm down after obviously horrendous calls and go on and win the game.
But a funny thing about managers who get ejected a lot: They win.
Besides Bobby Cox's World Series and 15 postseason appearances (14 of them by winning the division outright), you have John McGraw's six championships as a player or manager, Earl Weaver's World Series win, Leo Durocher's four titles and Frankie Frisch's four. Ninth on that list of ejectees, you'll note, is Joe Torre, who grabbed four titles of his own -- and managed the Braves after and before Bobby Cox.
I've known I was going to write this diary for several months. I've known for weeks -- since Chipper Jones, the Braves' longtime third baseman, went down for the season with an injury and the Braves lost one of their biggest bats -- that I needed to get a start on it if it was going to be worth half a darn because you can only write this diary once, and you have to get it the way you want it because there is no diary tomorrow. You can only say this goodbye once. (The next goodbye will have me crying considerably harder.)
But I had been hoping I wouldn't have to write this diary yet. I'd been hoping the Braves would just keep winning for Bobby, and Lord knows if you could care and love your way to a win, the Braves would have won more games than they'd played this year.
Bobby Cox as the Braves' manager was one of the few remaining bridges to my childhood -- to the good parts. My grandparents' swimming pool was long ago filled in or something, their home architecturally raped by a school that did its level best to destroy me. Joe Gibbs, who coached my formerly hometown Washington Redskins to their last Super Bowl (around the time I started watching sports -- I chose a bloody fantastic time), came back to coach the team and was mortal at best. The house I grew up in is someone else's. Even my name is different (changed it when I got married because no way was I saddling the wife with a hyphenated beast like that).
Stability among longtime Braves also faded. Greg Maddux left for Chicago and then bounced around a bit before landing in Chicago's front office. John Smoltz used to start baseball games on TBS and now does analysis for that network and MLB Network. Tom Glavine is with the Braves, but not on the mound. Terry Pendleton -- the Braves' third baseman when I started watching baseball -- is the hitting coach. Andruw Jones and Javy Lopez left years ago. Leo Mazzone left for the Orioles.
And longtime Braves announcer Skip Caray died:
(I was at work when I found out Skip Caray had died. I still don't know how I got through the last few hours of work that day.)
And now ... Bobby Cox won't be in the dugout. And that's new in every meaningful sense of the word. Bobby Cox isn't there anymore.
And if he's not there, what in the hell is the point anymore? Why bother? With anything? He's gone. He'll be in the front office for a few years, but ... Bobby Cox isn't going to be there in April in his manager's uniform, walking resolutely out of the dugout to correct an umpire on the count (the first time I saw an umpire admit he was wrong, Bobby Cox was the one who corrected him). He's not ...
Goodbye, Bobby.