Disappointment of the Week: Bobby Cox’s career comes to an end
Hopefully the criticism will too.
When the 2010 Atlanta Braves season ended on Monday night, so too did the career of longtime manager Bobby Cox.
“It’s flown by for me,” Cox said at a press conference on Wednesday afternoon. “The reason it flies by, I suppose, is because you’re having fun...there’s a lot of anxiety involved in it, but it’s still fun.”
Cox spent a quarter century on the bench here in Atlanta and is widely considered one of the best managers in Major League Baseball history after winning 14 consecutive division titles and the 1995 World Series.
But for all of Cox’s success, the murmurs of his critics continue to linger.
The Braves boasted arguably the best pitching staff in baseball for the better part of a decade, but only managed to win one World Championship.
Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and John Smoltz will be forever linked as one of the greatest pitching threesomes in the history of the sport, but for all their collective greatness—combining to win seven Cy Young awards from 1991-98—they were never able to slip on more than one World Series ring.
There’s little doubt that the Braves should’ve won more than one World Championship, but you can’t place all of the blame on Cox.
Why not? Because when compared to the three other major professional sports in this country, baseball is the most challenging one to conquer.