Atlanta’s brutal week of baseball deaths continued yesterday, as word came down that Hall of Famer Bobby Cox had died.
Cox was uni-notable because, as shown above, he was the only manager of his generation to wear spikes. As I recall it, this was something people began talking about during his time in Atlanta, but he had already been doing it while skippering the Blue Jays in the early 1980s.
Cox became so successful as a manager that it’s easy to forget he was also briefly a player, appearing over 200 games for the Yankees in 1968 and ’69. Here’s how he looked in their home and road uniforms:
Finally, no aesthetic assessment of Bobby Cox would be complete without a look at him arguing with umpires, a pastime that got him ejected an MLB-record 162 times — a full season’s worth of ejections! Here’s a greatest-hits reel:
As a Mets fan, it was basically my job to hate the entire Atlanta team back in the 1990s and 2000s, but I always respected and even admired Cox, who seemed like the dictionary definition of how a big league manager should look and behave. R.I.P.
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May Day
You may have heard that Cardinals pitcher Dustin May, who wears No. 3, gained a bit of notoriety last Sunday when his NOB and uni number matched up with the date — May 3:
MLB.com writer Max Ralph put together a great article about other players who have played on a date that matched their name/number combos. It’s basically a Uni Watch article — I wish I’d written it myself. Check it out here.