Since June 23, 1990, major league teams have employed a total of 189 managers. One-hundred-eighty-eight worked for one or more of 29 of the 30 teams. Bobby Cox is the 189th, the only manager the Atlanta Braves have had since they named him their manager on that date.
As Cox prepares for the start of his final spring training Saturday, it is remarkable to put his tenure with the Braves in perspective. According to Elias Sports Bureau research, only one team has had as few as two managers in that span. The Minnesota Twins have employed only Tom Kelly and Ron Gardenhire.
Next come the New York Yankees, the San Francisco Giants, the Oakland Athletics and the Tampa Bay Rays with four each. The Rays, of course, have been in business only since 1998. The Chicago Cubs and the Cincinnati Reds have had the most managers in those 19 ½ seasons, 10 each, followed by the Baltimore Orioles, the Kansas City Royals and the Florida Marlins with nine each.
These figures could require updating by the end of the season, maybe even by the start of the 2011 season should Cox change his mind and continue working.
“I’m 99.9 percent sure; I’m pretty set on it,” Cox said of his decision to retire at the end of the season. Why now?
“I’ll be 69 in May,” he said in a telephone interview. “It’s a hard decision. I could probably go another five years, but I reached the point where I had to make a decision. The only way to do it is to announce publicly that I’m retiring. We haven’t won in a few years. Maybe it’s time to give someone else a chance.”
I have a couple of things to say about that. First, if I had talked with Cox before he made his announcement, I would have encouraged him to continue managing. Baseball is a better game for having Bobby Cox as an active part of it. It’s certainly better for the people like me who write about the game.
But having Cox as part of the game is good for the game itself. And the Braves don’t need to give someone else a chance right now. Their failure to finish in first place the last four years after an unparalleled string of 14 consecutive division titles stems from no shortcomings of Cox. The Braves seriously undermined their chances of winning by paring their payroll and their talent.
Cox remains blameless within the Braves’ organization even though some Atlanta fans have criticized him for winning only one World Series in the team’s 14-year run. (I have often said that if the Braves had had Mariano Rivera as their closer they would have won a few more World Series and the Yankees a few less.)
“If the ball had bounced our way, we probably would have won some others,” Cox said, “but I’m proud of the organization for what it did. This is my last year. I’d like to go out with my last game being in the World Series.”
As the Braves’ general manager for 17 years, John Schuerholz never had to fire the manager, and he never thought less of him for not winning more than one World Series.
“Most of his decisions were based on reliability and respect,” Schuerholz said. “He respects the guy for being able to compete in that situation. The players who came up short in post-season were the guys he relied on and succeeded with throughout the year and he had the most confidence in. In his decision-making he always made decisions based on whom he thought would give us the best chance to win. I never had a circumstance where I said I wonder about that.”
Schuerholz actually replaced Cox as general manager when the Braves hired him in October 1990. He and Cox have been one of the great baseball duos, maybe the greatest, of all time.
But it doesn’t take Schuerholz to call Cox the best manager in baseball. Other general managers have called him that.
“I wouldn’t quarrel with anyone who says he’s the best manager in baseball,” Schuerholz said. “One of the real assets we’ve enjoyed as an organization is we’ve had many good players. He and I worked in partnership with the accumulation of players who can help us win.”
One of Cox’s strengths has been to take the players Schuerholz has added in each off-season and integrate them seamlessly into the team. Gary Sheffield joined the Braves in 2002 with a reputation for being a difficult player in the clubhouse but offered no problems at all.
Cox has that kind of impact on players. “The next time you see a player saying there’s no way I want to play for Bobby Cox that will be the first person,” said Schuerholz, now the Braves’ president.
Discussing Cox’s strengths as a manager, Schuerholz cited “integrity, consistency, uncompromising with respect to his honoring the game of baseball, his demanding that the players who wear the uniform of the team he manages look at the game in the same way.”
Stan Kasten was the Braves’ president for most of Cox’s tenure in Atlanta. ‘If I can boil it down to one thing,” Kasten said, “Bobby can get you to believe in what he is doing. He’s always been consistent.”
Kasten said he once heard an interview with Ken Caminiti, who briefly played for the Braves, in which Caminiti said “he was struck by the way we had an unbelievable stress free, casual atmosphere but an intense approach to every play.”
That unusual contrast goes along with Cox’s seeming incongruity of being a calm, relaxed manager who holds the record for most career managerial ejections with 151.
“You would never think this was a guy who would set the record for ejections,” said Kasten, who also was president of the NBA Hawks. “I had Kevin Loughery who also got thrown out of games. Kevin was a crazy man on the court but a nice guy off the court. Bobby’s just different on and off the field.”
Both Kasten and Schuerholz said Cox acts as he does with umpires to support and protect his players. Cox has nothing against umpires, Schuerholz added.
“He’s got an unbelievable capacity to argue with passion and fire in supporting his players,” Schuerholz said, “and the next day, no matter what was said, Bobby will treat that person with the respect and kindness he treats everyone with.”
Don Baylor echoed that view based on his knowledge of Cox as an opposing player and a member of his coaching staff in 1999.
“One year I played against him when he was managing Toronto and I had one of the best games I ever had in my career,” Baylor recalled. “Sometimes when you have a day like that, guys throw at you. But Coxie was never that way. He always treated me the same way, first class.”
When he coached for Cox, Baylor said, he was impressed with the way Cox treated the players like grownups. “You see these teams go out and do their stretching,” Baylor related. “He doesn’t have organized exercises. Just get yourself ready to play.”
And Cox creates a businesslike atmosphere in the clubhouse, Baylor said. That means no loud music. And, he added, “He let the coaches coach. You ask him certain things, he gives you an answer. He doesn’t put you off. Being around him you knew you were in the presence of one of the best managers who ever managed.”
Schuerholz said he thinks Cox has decided to retire so he can spend more time with his family, something baseball people don’t get a lot of time to do. But he acknowledged, “Bobby loves his job. He loves to wear his metal spikes still and walk across the concrete. I don’t think any staff member on any team wears metal spikes anymore. He loves being a manager, loves getting to the ball park early, meeting with the coaches, talking to players. But he also loves his family.”
“I love the game,” Cox said enthusiastically. “It’s hard to break away from it. They’ll allow me to be part of the organization. I won’t be in their hair, meddling with them. Our minor league affiliates are close. I could drive to all of them. I could talk to the kids if they want. I’ve always liked the minors.”
I asked Cox if he had any special highlights from his career that he cared to talk about. “Every year was a highlight,” he said. “We won 14 division titles in a row. You have to have great players. I remember the big three.” He refered to Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and John Smoltz, his great pitchers for most of the 14-year run. “I said every manager should have that luxury once.”
IT’S A SPRING TIE: FLORIDA 15, ARIZONA 15
For baseball geography buffs, there are interesting developments with the first spring training camps opening Thursday. With the move of the Cincinnati Reds to Arizona, the major leagues are divided in half for the first time, 15 teams in Florida and 15 in Arizona.
The Reds are the fifth team in eight years to abandon Florida and take up residence in Arizona. It has been a period in which Arizona and its cities have aggressively pursued teams for spring training while Florida and its cities have been cavalier about the teams they had.
Fort Lauderdale, Fla., for example, has lost its second team in 15 years, both teams moving to the state’s west coast. The New York Yankees, who had trained there for 34 years, left after 1995 for Tampa, and now the Baltimore Orioles, who replaced the Yankees in my favorite spring training city, have moved to Sarasota.
The Reds had been in Sarasota the last dozen years and now are not in Florida for the first time since the World War II years of 1943 through ‘45. The Reds’ move to Goodyear, Ariz., where they join the Cleveland Indians in a two-team complex that has become popular in that state, created a scheduling dilemma.
With 15 teams in each state, one team either would have to be off each day, or one team would have to play split-squad games to make an even 16 teams.
“It was an interesting challenge,” Katy Feeney, baseball’s chief schedulemaker, said, “although it wasn’t as difficult to generate as I thought it would be just thinking about it.”
Working with teams’ preferences, Feeney said, she had to schedule most of the split-squad games on weekends and early and late in spring training, times when teams don’t want to be off.
The Florida, or Grapefruit League part of the schedule, was more difficult to create, she said, because of travel distances, which are greater than those in the Arizona Cactus League.
The Reds’ migration to Arizona held another significance. It marks the 29th time they have changed spring sites, breaking their tie with the Chicago White Sox for most changes.
LINCECUM TALKS HIMSELF OUT OF MONEY
Not since Don Mattingly in 1987 has a star player been intimidated in salary arbitration the way Tim Lincecum was intimidated last week. Except Mattingly was intimidated by George Steinbrenner; Lincecum intimidated himself.
In 1987 Mattingly, the Yankees’ first baseman, was coming off another great season. The year before he led the American League in hits, doubles, total bases, slugging percentage and combined slugging and on-base percentages and was in the top three in runs, runs batted in and batting average.
Mattingly had played for a $1,375,000 salary that season, and arbitration experts were predicting that he could seek any salary he wanted for 1987. However, before player and club exchanged figures for a possible hearing, Steinbrenner said he would not give Mattingly $2 million and threatened to trade him if he asked for too much.
There was no way that the owner could have traded Mattingly and been able to appear in public in New York, but his intimidation worked. Mattingly submitted $1,975,000 and won.
Lincecum submitted $13 million this year and San Francisco sought an $8 million salary. The Giants made no threats or menacing statements of any kind, but Lincecum made some comments of his own.
The 25-year-old pitcher was arrested last Oct. 30 in Washington State and charged with possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia, and he said he thought the Giants might bring up the arrest. He said he would have no hard feelings if they did, but he seemed to think it could affect his chances of winning.
More likely to affect his chances of winning were his consecutive Cy Young seasons and his 33-12 record and 2.55 earned run-run average in those seasons as well as 526 strikeouts in 452 1/3 innings.
Instead of going through with the hearing, Lincecum agreed to a two-year, $23 million contract. In effect, the Giants took the salaries the two sides submitted, theirs for this year, Lincecum’s for next, and added a $2 million signing bonus.
Compare that deal with the $78 million and $80 million contracts, each for five years, that Felix Hernandez (Seattle) and Justin Verlander (Detroit) recently agreed to.