In Robert Joseph Cox’s Hall of Fame–worthy managerial career, spent almost entirely with the Braves, the sixty-nine-year-old earned 2,504 wins (fourth all-time), fifteen division titles (a record fourteen in a row), one World Series ring, and 158 ejections, the most in Major League Baseball history. “I’m not proud of that last record,” grumbles Cox. “There is no record. It’s a simple matter of longevity.” In retirement since the 2010 season, his immediate plans are “to relax.”
The Mick Playing third base for the New York Yankees, he once turned a triple play with Mickey Mantle in 1968, during Mantle’s final season.
Vacation In April he and his wife, Pam, took a two-week cruise in the Mediterranean, a gift from his last group of players.
Listen Up He will tune into most baseball games this year on XM radio.
Ready Fredi He told new Braves manager Fredi Gonzalez to be himself and not worry about what Cox would have done.
Says Ted On firing Cox (before rehiring him five years later) in 1981: “I said to our guys, when he was manager of the year in the American League [at Toronto], ‘We just fired the manager of the year for chrissakes! Dumbasses.’”
Photograph courtesy of the Atlanta Braves
