The End Of An Era

Pathetically, it has been over a month since I’ve written anything here (I’ve been busy, I swear!), but I thought it was worth coming out of retirement to briefly mention something about the retirement of long-time Braves manager Bobby Cox.

Cox announced before the season started that this would be his last, but his career officially came to an end last night when the Braves lost another excruciating one-run game to the Giants in the NLDS.

A lot of good articles have been written in tribute to Cox, so I won’t spend a lot of time doing that here, but I just wanted to note a couple of things.

First, Cox is one of the greatest managers of all time, and his run of 14 consecutive playoff appearances will likely never be equaled. He’s also one of only two managers with 6 100-win seasons, and that is impressive as well. Certainly he didn’t win as often in the postseason as I (or he, or anyone) would have liked, and near the end of his career he began to make a lot of pitching moves that I didn’t understand, but none of that takes away from a remarkable managerial career.

Secondly, people always emphasize how Cox was a “player’s manager”—he’s the kind of manager that players love to play for because he is upfront about his expectations and always supports his players. Many of his players have looked up to him as a father figure, and the fact that he inspires his players to give their best probably has a lot to do with the fact that the 2010 Braves, a team that had absolutely no business playing in the postseason, managed to come away with the NL Wildcard. You could probably even argue that of all his seasons at the helm of the Braves, 2010 was his best managerial performance.

Anyway, one way or another it’s the end of an era in Atlanta, and despite certain things that I disliked about him, I’ll miss seeing Bobby sitting in the dugout with his arms folded, muttering to himself and contemplating whether or not he should go out and get tossed from a game in order to back up one of his guys.

So Long, Junior

This morning as I was watching Sportscenter I learned that Ken Griffey Jr. had retired after 22 seasons in the Major Leagues. I wrote about Griffey back when he hit his 600th home run, but now that he has retired, I just wanted to make a couple of remarks about his career.

Although I still love baseball and expect that I always will, my obsession with baseball likely reached its peak in the early to mid 90s. At that point I played league baseball every year, watched every Braves game I had access to, spent every cent I could scrape together on packs of baseball cards, and each baseball season I devoted every ounce of free time I could to the imaginary baseball league I created in the back yard (I would play all the games myself and keep stats for all the players; it was pretty awesome in an OCD kind of way).

And during that time, Ken Griffey Jr. was the undisputed king of the baseball world. You could maybe even argue that we was the king of the entire sporting world—everyone respected Michael Jordan, but they liked Griffey. And how could you not? He did everything well and seemed to have such a good time doing it.

As time went on though, Griffey started to suffer through a string of injuries which somewhat limited his production, while at the same time a lot of other players suddenly got really muscular and started jacking home runs in quantities that made Griffey’s numbers look modest by comparison. At the time, Griffey was often overlooked because of this, but in the long run, I think it’s what will secure his legacy—he hit 630 home runs over his 22-year career, and he did it the right way. Only Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth and Willie Mays could make the same claim, and that’s impressive company.

Finally, Griffey retiring is kind of sad for me personally as it sort of marks the end of an era—the up and coming young superstar of my youth is now too old to play. If “The Kid”—who always wore his hat backwards in batting practice while blowing big bubbles with his gum—has to retire, I guess all of us are getting older, huh?