Atlanta lost its skipper. Bobby Cox, the Hall of Fame manager who ran the dugout for 14 straight Braves division titles and the franchise's 1995 World Series championship, died Saturday at 84. The Braves announced his death the same day, calling him the best manager to ever wear the uniform. He would have turned 85 on May 21.
Cox's career as Atlanta's manager played out almost entirely in Summerhill. The Braves played at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium when he took the dugout in 1990, and they moved across the parking lot to Turner Field in 1997. Cox managed his last regular-season game at Turner Field in October 2010 and retired with 2,504 wins, fourth-most in Major League Baseball history. Truist Park in Cobb County did not exist yet. Every banner he hung, every ejection that became a Bobby Cox legend, every late-inning argument, was inside the perimeter, in the neighborhood where Atlanta's baseball history lived for the better part of half a century.
The Braves return home Tuesday night to start a three-game series against the Chicago Cubs. WSB-TV reported the team will honor both Cox and former owner Ted Turner with a video tribute and a moment of silence before first pitch at 7:15 p.m. Turner, who bought the Braves in 1976 and turned them into America's Team by airing every game on WTCG-TV and later TBS, died May 6 at 87. Cox followed three days later. The two losses landing on the same week, before the team's first home game in nearly a week, gave the Braves the kind of tribute night nobody scheduled for.
The shape of Cox's legacy is straightforward enough to fit on the back of a baseball card and complicated enough to fill the next month of sports radio. Fourteen consecutive division titles is a record nobody else has. Five National League pennants in that run. One ring, the 1995 World Series, the one that finally gave Atlanta a championship after a generation of close calls. SaportaReport's Lance Russell, in a tribute column published Monday, framed Cox's ejections, 158 regular season and 3 postseason, more than any manager in MLB history, as the truest measure of the man. He was thrown out of games defending his players, never himself. WABE's Closer Look devoted Monday's hour to Cox and to what made the Braves of his era unstoppable, a question Atlanta sports fans have been answering for 30 years and will keep answering for a long time. Tonight is the first chance to say it together inside a stadium.
