Stoic to the end in his public visage, if a man who has been ejected a record 158 times for arguing with baseball's judicial tyrants can be called "stoic." Bobby Cox could bring himself to do no more Monday than flash a shy, close-lipped smile, and a thumbs-up to a Turner Field audience that had just watched an only-too-familiar sight.
Back in the postseason for the first time in five years, their Atlanta Braves were exiting much the same way they had done over a record-setting tenure therein — with nothing much of anything to show for having gotten there in the first place.
This wasn't the way Braves fans or many baseball fans otherwise wanted to see Cox conclude his quiet reign as the manager who returned the Braves to greatness and kept them there for the most part.
"It's going to be strange to come here next year and Bobby Cox won't be managing the team," said San Francisco Giants manager Bruce Bochy, whose charges had just run the Braves out of Dodge with a 3-2 Game Four win to finish a National League division series that really could have gone either way — all four games were decided by a single run, and nobody suffered anything resembling an overwhelming defeat.
"I've always looked up to him, not just how he manages the game, but his team, how professional they are," Bochy continued. "They are always in uniform. They play the game right."
Bochy was being overly kind in his respect. These Braves actually made these Giants sweat just a little bit more than is likely to be remembered for their trip to the National League Championship Series. The Braves' defensive shortcomings and the Giants' slightly stronger pitching made the biggest difference.
Allow that Cox was hobbled by one or two key injuries too many. Maybe the key of them all was losing Martin Prado to a late-September hip pointer. That compelled Cox to bring in Brooks Conrad, poor good hit/weak fielding devil, and good field/no-hit (.138) Diory Hernandez, in order to deploy Omar Infante, a multi-position player by trade, at third.
Nothing, though, could have overcome the point that their stout pitching just wasn't quite stout enough, their bullpen wasn't close enough to the Giants' level, and their bats — which were among the National League's most lethal May through August, though sleepy enough in April and September — weren't quite enough to threaten carving their names into any Giant foreheads.
How anemic did the Braves' bats become? They hit .175, had nothing better than a .214 on-base percentage, and slugged a mere .263 all series long. The Giants weren't exactly executioners at the plate, either. In fact, the Giants hit a mere .212 on the series, with a mere .288 OBP and a mere .295 SLG.
And the two teams' pitching was a lot closer than you might have thought while watching them. The Giants threw a 1.66 ERA at the Braves throughout the series ... but the Braves threw a 1.95 ERA right back at the Giants. Both teams, moreover, compiled a 1.27 WHIP all series long. The total scoring, when all was said and done, was 11-9, Giants.
Three unearned runs made all the difference in the world for the Giants getting to send Tim Lincecum out to face Roy Halladay in Game 1 of the League Championship Series. And all the difference in the world for just when Bobby Cox's retirement would begin officially.
Cox is still likely to end up in Cooperstown, though with a legacy bound to be debated for time immemorial. He was never renowned as a master tactician; he was too often caught staying strictly enough by the book where a little daring might have made a lot of difference. Or not reading the book deeply enough.
It only began in Game 7 of the 1991 World Series. He pulled Game 1 starter/loser Charlie Liebrandt, the ancient left-handed knuckleballer, back from the doghouse and sent him to work the 11th in relief. All he remembered was Liebrandt striking out Kirby Puckett in Game 1. He didn't stop to think that Liebrandt had gotten lucky against the American League's best 1991 hitter against lefthanders, since the last time Puckett faced Liebrandt in American League competition, it ended with Puckett taking a trip around the bases. The fourth pitch of Liebrandt's Game Seven assignment took another flight over the fence. Off Puckett's bat.
Cox's long and mostly distinguished career all but resurrected baseball in the South. (Take a look, for one example, at how many of these Giants grew up rooting for his Braves. Buster Posey, the heralded rookie, did. Game Four starter Madison Bumgarner grew up idolizing Tom Glavine, and it showed Monday — he pitched like nothing short of a young man who'd taken direct instruction from the Hall of Famer in waiting.)
It ended with the tying and winning runs stranded on base. With his Braves still not having won an elimination game since ... 1995, the only year in which he finished a season with a World Series ring on his and his players' fingers. And with Cox yet again showing too much faith in his players and not enough faith in the probabilities. Why else would he let Derek Lowe talk him into letting him hang in a little while longer when the veteran probably should have come out with a 2-1 lead and one out after a stout Game 4 start?
Cox otherwise has five pennants (all with the Braves) to show for managing sixteen teams to the postseason, including a somewhat unlikely collection of Toronto Blue Jays in 1985. That gives him slightly more to show than Leo Durocher on the field, but Cox's isn't the kind of character that might compel the appropriate voters to wait until he's gone to his reward to enshrine him.
He might have benched hapless Brooks Conrad for Game 4,, but he didn't doghouse him. He sent Conrad out to pinch hit leading off the bottom of the ninth. Conrad may be wearing the unfair goat horns for this set, thanks to his harrowing Game Three — the Braves practically had it won, thanks to Hinske hitting one out in the eighth, before Conrad's sad Bill Buckner re-enactment in the top of the ninth. But the Braves got here in the first place largely because he played as well as he did as a utility man and, not coincidentally, became the first rookie to hit two pinch-hit grand slams in a season.
And he should have earned respect aplenty for being a standup man after Game 3 and most of Monday pre-game, until he finally choked on emotion and excused himself, unable to speak any longer, genuinely heartsick over what he thought he might have been helping to cost Cox.
He wasn't even close to alone. Even if he did open the Atlanta ninth Monday by flying out to center field.
Jason Heyward might have been the National League's most talked-about rookie who wasn't named Stephen Strasburg. The good news: he finally awoke in Game 4 with two hits. The bad news: They proved meaningless — a two-out single in the second off which he was stranded, after he got second on the house (thanks to Mike Fontenot's throwing error); a one-out single in the sixth that got him nothing, but forced for the side by Troy Glaus.
Heyward also hit twice with men in scoring position and came up empty, fouling out for the side behind the plate in the third (with the Braves holding a tenuous enough 1-0 lead), and striking out for the side with pinch-runner Nate McLouth (for Brian McCann, whose sacrifice fly sent Infante home earlier) aboard second in the eighth. Final series batting average: .124.
Lowe was once the man on the mound for all three clinching wins in the Boston Red Sox's stupefying 2004 postseason run. He had already pitched a stout enough game on the wrong side of Tim Lincecum's Game 1 masterpiece. Come Monday, Lowe pitched even better, no-hitting the Giants through five and a third and looking for moments enough as though he had a chance to join Halladay in an extremely select club.
Then Cody Ross hit one five or six rows into the left field seats with one out in the sixth. An inning later, after talking Cox into letting him hang in, Lowe ran out of his final fume of petrol. He walked Aubrey Huff, one of the Giants' veteran retreads, and watched sadly but knowingly when Posey was able to beat out a sharp rapper to Glaus at third that wasn't even going to draw a throw.
Once a World Series MVP (for the 2002 Anaheim Angels), Glaus managed one strikeout and one stranded runner in three at-bats, before Hernandez replaced him at third in a seventh-inning double switch. He handled the Posey rapper looking exactly the way he had looked turning a 10th-inning double play in Game 2, like a man wishing someone had planted a barf bag under the base for his immediate use.
When Lowe walked Pat Burrell to load the pads, his evening ended with a sympathetic pat on the rump from Cox and a sad view of his 2-1 lead going up in smoke. His relief, Peter Moylan, served up something Juan Uribe could cue up to shortstop, from here Alex Gonzalez (no relation to the one whose off-the-chest double play hopper miss helped cost the 2003 Cubs the pennant) threw wide enough to pull Infante off the pad at second while Huff helped himself across the plate, ending any double play hope and leaving the bases loaded for pinch-hitter Aaron Rowand (for Fontenot, a swishout) and Ross's RBI single scoring Posey.
The only reason the Giants didn't cash in more was that Burrell, not exactly renowned as a road runner these days, thought he had a clean shot at scoring behind Posey. Considering the Braves' series-long defencive anemia, it wasn't an unreasonable thought. Except that left fielder Matt Diaz got even more unreasonable, picking the right time to show the Braves weren't a complete collection of doddering defenders.
Diaz threw Burrell out at the plate with a little help from behind the dish, McCann withstanding the train-wreck to make the out stand. That kept the score 3-2. It might as well have been 13-2 considering the strength of the San Francisco bullpen. Bumgarner gave the Giants a start magnificent enough, keeping the game close enough for them to make it matter, and the bulls ran just enough to hold the Braves despite a little ninth-inning hair-raising at Brian Wilson's potential expense.
Rick Ankiel — whose eleventh-inning bomb produced the Braves' only win in the set as it was — drew a one-out walk. Eric Hinske — whose eighth-inning bomb looked like the prospective Game Three winner, until poor Conrad's third mishap of the evening a half-inning later — pinch hit for Hernandez and walked right behind Ankiel. Of all people, pitcher Tim Hudson ran for Hinske, but Cox could have sent Jesse Owens to pinch run and still see his managerial career end with the tier and winner stranded.
Wilson swished Infante and Miguel Cabrera grounded out to third, Uribe (who'd moved to third in a defensive switch in the seventh) throwing high enough to make Huff stretch but not pulling him off enough to lose the out and the trip to the NLCS.
Cox spoke one more time to his players after the game, some of whom had gotten only their first taste of life with Cox during Cox's final season of life managing the Braves. "I understand now," said Derrek Lee, who spent seven weeks with the Braves after a trade from the Chicago Cubs where he'd been a fan favorite, "why they've been to so many postseasons. Because he makes it so easy on his players. It's just a great atmosphere, a great, positive atmosphere to play baseball."
"When you see a legend talk to you," said closer Billy Wagner, who fell out of the division series thanks to yet another injury, and whose own distinguished career is ending, "I mean, you listen and you try to take in everything you can of his wisdom. He's one of a kind. There'll never be another Bobby Cox who'll have that much influence on your life and career, that even when you played against him you were a fan of the Braves."
Even the Giants had nothing but words of respect for the Braves' manager emeritus. "I saw them," Cox said after the game. "And I gave them a thumbs-up, too ... That was [a] nice gesture by the Giants. I love Bochy. He's one of the best guys in baseball. If we couldn't win, I'm glad he did."
Cox was always gracious in defeat. But that was the problem, Monday evening. Yet again, it was in defeat.
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