Since there was no game last night (let’s hope the boys got some much needed rest and home cooking), and tonight’s game against the Arizona Grits is the occasion for a re-staging of last year’s Chipper Jones retirement ceremony to retire officially his #10 jersey, I thought it might be nice to make today’s game blog a forum for people to share their favorite memories of our Mr. Jones. Doesn’t have to be a huge, consequential game moment, necessarily – just whatever the most indelible LWJ, Jr. image that has stuck with you might be.
I have a weird confession to make, which is that Chipper was never my favorite Brave. I loved and respected his ability and, especially later on, his baseball acumen. I’ve admired his ability to break down, analyze, and rebuild both his own swing and batting approach and those of other players. (I do wish he wouldn’t help players on other teams on the nights the Braves are actually playing them [*cough*Adam LaRoche*cough*], but whatever. Bygones.) Nor do I hold his occasional character failings against him; we’re all of us human, and it would be pretty unrealistic, not to say hypocritical, to expect young, famous athletes with lots of money and access to the perks of that success not to falter now and then.
I guess it’s just that my favorite players have always been guys who seemed admirable or, failing that, more relatable to me. My favorite Brave will always be Henry Aaron, who withstood a firestorm of inchoate hatred during what would likely have been the most stressful part of his life even under the best of circumstances. To have done what he did under a mounting barrage of death threats and other vile assaults is beyond my comprehension, and, I’m certain, would have been beyond my own meager resolve. Hank is my hero in the truest sense. (I always hoped to name a son after him; I’m never going to have one now, so my daughter should be happy she didn’t get saddled with it instead.)
My favorite pitcher, in the Golden Era, was Tom Glavine, because I loved that he had to use guile and control to win, not power, and because as previously noted I’m pretty much a pro-union guy and respected his principled work as the team player representative and, later, as a rep for the whole union, even while more than a few fans basically spit on him for it. (I know some of you will not feel the same as I do on this issue, and that’s fine, but that’s my take.)
And my favorite current Brave, ever since he came up, has been Brian McCann, who seemed the real life version of who I might have been in my fantasies of growing up to be a Brave myself: a hometown guy, a catcher, a little on the portly side; not the guy who was heralded because of his obviously prodigious talent – that, of course, would be his pal Jeff Francoeur – but the guy without such gifts who toiled in the shadows, rising inch-by-inch solely by dint of commitment and work ethic, the guy who became a star while nobody was watching. I’ve found in my life that, while our society tends to worship at the altar of “talent,†hard work will beat out talent just about every time. Certainly I’d rather put my money on a Brian McCann or a Martin Prado or a Kris Medlen – guys who had to work harder because no one gave them much of a shot – than a Frenchy or his ilk. (No offense, Jeff. Best of luck.)
But of course I couldn’t help liking Chipper, because he had both (talent + work ethic). What I didn’t love was that he knew it. My grandfather, also previously discussed in this space, drilled into me the importance of humility almost to the point of pathology – which I respect from a moral standpoint, but which I have to say hasn’t always helped me get ahead in life. People who toot their own horns get more attention, and sometimes that makes a difference.
Chipper, though, was more complicated than that. He was famously cocky, but he could back it up. (In the phrase I’ve seen variously attributed to Andrew Jackson, Bear Bryant, and Muhammad Ali, “It ain’t braggin’ if it’s true.â€) I think for a long time I didn’t know quite how to feel about that; I admired it even as it offended me a little.
Over time, though, as I’ve grown older and gotten more comfortable with the rich complexities and ambiguities of life, I’ve come to find a peace with the complicated Larry Wayne Jones. I found I didn’t need him to be (or at least seem, right?) perfect; I didn’t need him to be a hero. As his body got older and broke down more and more often, for longer and longer periods of time, I saw the effort it took to get himself onto the field and, far more often than not, still play at an elite level: swatting sweet-swinging doubles and home runs to put the team ahead late; moving in to grab the squibber on the infield grass bare-handed and hurl it, in one motion as his body fell, to nail the runner at first by an eyelash. I thought about the way he talked about learning from Terry Pendleton (another of my favorites) during his rookie season in that magical championship year, and how a worn-down TP would come in off the field and ask Chipper to take his shoes off for him because he couldn’t bend to do it himself. (A story repeated in DOB’s game blog today, by the way, if you want to hear him tell it.)
The young, cocky Chipper? That held little appeal for me. But the older, sadder-but-wiser Chipper, the one whose body was betraying him in that cruel, inevitable fate that comes to all athletes fortunate enough to have long careers? The one whose shame and sense of having failed his family, his public and himself forced him to acknowledge openly the failure of his marriage and the affair that had given him a son out of wedlock? The one who learned humility the hard way, synthesized it into his own sense of self, a self-regard that had been justified in its pride and superiority but which now began to be leavened with a knowledge that there was more to being a good or great man, or husband, or father, than being a great ballplayer? That there was accountability, as well?
That guy, I could relate to. That guy, I could love.
And so, oddly, my two indelible images of Chipper have little to do with his own prodigious feats on the field. One is from Game 7 of the 1996 NLCS; the Braves had trailed in the series to the St. Louis Cardinals three games to one, but had come back to tie the series at three-all. And, led by Tom Glavine, Fred McGriff, Javy Lopez and Andruw Jones, they quickly did away with any suspense. Glavine was masterful, dealing seven innings of three-hit, shutout baseball, and, by the time the Crime Dog singled in Mark Lemke and Chipper in the bottom of the 4th to make it a 6-0 game, the outcome seemed (and was) predetermined. My lasting memory, strangely, is of watching Chipper come across the plate and walk back to the dugout with Lemke, that cocky, lopsided grin spread as wide as it ever could be. The Braves looked and felt like world-beaters in that moment, and Jones was their king and knew it.
The Braves would go on to win 15-0 and skate to a World Series date with the Yankees, in the post-season curtain call for Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. That game may have been as much curse as blessing, though, because – and I’m speaking only for myself here – when the Braves went up three games to one on New York and then, after dropping the fifth tilt, led Game 6 by a 6-0 score fairly early, the memory of that last game against St. Louis led me (and maybe the Braves, as well?) to assume, wrongly, that our second championship in two years was all but won. A hanging slider from Mark Wohlers to Jim Leyritz killed that dream good and dead, the defeat was all the more excruciating for having been seized from the jaws of apparent triumph, and sometimes I wonder if the franchise has ever truly recovered. (When I think about that, I feel like I sort of know how Pirates fans have felt, post-Sid’s Slide. Although obviously they’ve had it much worse.)
That sense of melancholy, always the flip side of the euphoria baseball can lavish on us, brings me to my other memory of Chipper: his absence, due to injury, from the 2010 NLDS against the San Francisco Giants. You know he would have given anything to be out there, given that it was Bobby Cox’s last hurrah. But he couldn’t. His body wouldn’t let him. Which meant, in Game 3, with the series knotted at one apiece, Omar Infante had to start at third, which meant Infante couldn’t start at second, which meant Brooks Conrad had to start at second. Which, at least on that night, didn’t work out so well. (Nothing against Brooks. Can’t ever forget that grand slam in the day game against the Reds earlier that year that walked off a game the Braves had been losing like a jillion-to-zero. Or the bunch of other great homers he hit that year, often as a pinch-hitter. I’ll always love Brooks Conrad.)
Anyway, the point of all this is that there are players you look up at as if they’re gods on a pedestal, like Hammerin’ Hank Aaron. And there are players you look at as relatable human beings, mortals who’ve reached Olympus seemingly through hard work alone, like BMac. And then there are the guys who evoke Hercules or Jason or Perseus, characters who seem so charmed and blessed as to have been spawned by the gods, but whose human frailty eventually, inexorably reveals itself.
And you’re left seeing them for what they really are: gifted athletes and ordinary men, whose greatness and lowness coexist simultaneously within their complex natures as is true for every human being ever to be born, live, and die on this earth. They are gods, and mortals, and heroes, and failures, and their narratives are the myths we learn as children but perhaps only truly understand as adults.
But if they’re lucky and smart, like Chipper Jones, they learn not to buy into their own myths. They learn how to be men, and happy.
Congratulations, Chipper, and thanks for those memories and a million more.
Great write up!
Here are my favorites:
– The dive against the Rockies in 1995 in the playoffs
– The weekend in 1999 when he took ownership of the Mets
– The walk off last year against the Phillies
Good ones. I think for me all those Mets-killing moments at Shea merge together into one glorious multiversal montage. 🙂
I’m still clinging to my last shred of hope that this is Chipper’s Roger Clemens moment where he tells us he’ll be back in a month. I’ve never quite accepted that the error in the wild card game is where his story ends.
Great writeup – my only quibble is that the Braves were up 2-0 in the 1996 WS before the wheels came off. The game in question was Game 4.
Thanks for that, Hotspur!
I have too many memories of Chipper to even know where to start… but I will say that one of my favorite Chipper memories is actually his final home run, a three-run game winning blast off Papelbon on September 2, 2012.
At the time, I was visiting an old friend of mine who grew up with me in Atlanta and has since moved to California – he and I played baseball together since childhood, and it was his family that introduced me to the dedicated cult of Braves fandom. Thanks to MLB.tv, we were able to watch a game together for the first time in years, and sure enough, Chipper crushes a 95 mph fastball for a no-doubt HR and the walkoff win. We whooped and hollered for probably 10-15 minutes, and I may have caused MLB.tv to crash due to all the times I rewatched the video clip. I still get goosebumps, watching that HR again.
@3 I’ll take your word for it. I usually have the BP game pages open to double-check that stuff, but I was in a rush on that one and trusted my memory. Which is notoriously unreliable. 🙂
Oh man oh man oh man Chipper called out Todd Van Poppel in his acceptance speech. Hall of Fame player AND Hall of Fame troll. Love you, Chipper.
Is anyone else glad Chipper wore a tie? I kinda thought he may show up in a Buck Commander shirt
Nice, Hotspur. Nice, Julio.
I remember Chipper’s willingness to play at short in 1996 when we needed him to when the alternative was a Belliard overdose. And his run at .400 back in 2008, convincing the last doubters that he really does belong in Cooperstown (where my boss is on vacation right now). And as Smitty says, letting the Mets know that they were the LolMets years before that became a thing.
Maybe one day we’ll reminisce about being there where Julio Teheran became a star, too.
A pop up to the infield from Andrelton? I’m shocked.
JASON!
At least Delgado knows he can make Andrelton pop up.
YESS!!!!!!!
So there’s two thirds of the outfield being productive. Can we finally make it three thirds, BJ?
Productive out, Chip? Jeez.
Guess Uggla’s was productive too.
McCann kind of sucks right now.
15- It resulted in two LOB, which is kind of like production. The kind of production you deposit in the bathroom.
That’s right, Shrimpy. You overslid and got thrown out. No go back to the dugout.
Way to go, Teheran!
If I told you that one of BJ, Chris, and Julio would get a hit… you’ve have predicted exactly what happened.
And Simmons was also very predictable.
I see Andrelton Simmons is back in the leadoff spot. This raises the question: exactly what would he have to do to get moved back for good? Exactly how bad would he have to be?
21- Probably worse than BJ. That’s not just setting the bar low, that’s burying it.
@21, Rather than wondering how awful Andrelton would have to be to move to the 8th spot, I’d rather think about how BJ would pick it up so he could start leading off.
Heyward’s got his average all the way up to .225. That’s impressive given how far down he was when his appendix went boom.
I’ll take it
BJ gets a gift “double”
Nice stroll into third there.
Just keep playing, not like he was going to catch anything anyways.
@26 – I was informed that was hammered.
Don’t even think about a squeeze, Fredi.
Ugh.
Bah, rotten luck.
Dammit. He hit the ball hard. Please don’t take the wrong lesson from this Fredi.
Crap. Massive luck for the D-bags, and now we’re condemned to an eternity of bunting in that situation or any similar.
Radio guys just alluded to an interesting question: who had the better pro career, emmit smith or chipper? Or perhaps better stated, who ranks higher in their respective sport!
YES!
Move that guy to cleanup!
Been a while for Simmons
SIMMONS… how many popups does that cancel out?
Simmon’s pop-up went a little further that time…
You should do that when there’s runners on base too, Andrelton.
Late to the celebration, but I don’t think I have a favorite Chipper moment — I respect the sustained excellence over anything else. Even Zombie Chipper was unmistakably Chipper. I don’t think his MVP season was *that* much better than his average season. That’s my memory — the gestalt.
OTOH, a good friend of mine, a former bartender in Orlando, remembers cocky Chipper trying to get beers for his underage girlfriend (20 years ago). She tells that story really well, but I’ll stick with on-field Chipper.
Lotsa Chipper memories in NYC, but I’m on the 7 train at the moment, not far from Flushing, so…
I’ll mention this: In Port Washington, Long Island, there’s a Braves fan who owns a deli (a Clemson grad) & to this day he sells a sandwich called The Chipper. Always liked that.
And Teheran just struck out the side. 10K in 6 innings. 103 pitches thrown. Another great outing for him.
Anybody notice that Sighted-Dan sucks exactly as much as Blind-Dan did?
BJ gets a real double, to make up for the fake one earlier!
There’s a real double for BJ.
Nice swing, Bupton.
Anyone else noticed that Prado did more talking there than the pitching coach? Wouldn’t Delgado be as apt to know the Rev’s scouting report?
T-Pasty…
You know, Pena being done for the year is a big, big blow, esecially if there is postseason play.
My favorite things about Chipper:
• The hubris of Tyler Van Poppel has always been a wonderful subtext to the career of Chipper Jones.
• His total ownership of the Mets, especially that wonderful 1999 season.
• This one swing I saw him take in one of his final seasons. He got a single after making an adjustment mid-swing to meet a change-up squarely as it crossed the plate. It was a thing of beauty.
The latter feeds into an appreciation for him that I’ve only had for one other Braves hitter and that’s Gary Sheffield. When either of those guys stepped up to the plate, they exuded a charisma that they owned the plate, and you knew they had the ability to back it up. I knew I was looking at a professional hitter whose skill level put them at the apex of the game. Whenever Chipper was up, there was nobody else I’d rather have up, no matter the situation. It was a privilege to have a guy like that in the lineup for over 15 years straight, and an gift to be able to see most of his at bats.
Sitting under the terrace on the 1B side.. So. Fucking. Humid.
hmmm two of those 4 balls to prado were strikes….
nice DP; avilan continues his good work.
I loved watching Sheffield bat. Amazing wrist action and he hit the ball so hard.
He may never get into the HOF, but lord could he hit.
Very satisfying watching Shrimpy GIDP.
I’m guessing after tonight’s matchup versus his old teammate, whatever fears the Braves had about Teheran’s mental makeup and confidence would have to be in the past. This kid looks like he knows what he’s doing.
Mets bullpen (4 relievers used in the inning so far) gives up 3 runs to tie it at 4-4.
Freddie! Alright BMac, drive them in.
Yeah, Brian is struggling right now.
Yeah, maybe there’s not actually any guarantee that it’ll turn around. I guess it’s entirely possible that we can go through the whole season getting on base at an above average clip, and slugging at an above average clip, and continue to hit like .067 with men in scoring position.
@%#&!! Mets. For fuck’s sake.
The Mets are so damn useless.
And Parnell gives up a couple of doubles for another run, 5-4 Nats.
Harvey went 7 innings, 3H 0BB 1R 11K and he gets a no decision and the Mets likely a loss out of it, talk about horrid relief pitching.
Edit: Go, Uggs!
Uggla’s got so few doubles because of all the TRIPLES he’s hitting this year. That’s his third, right?
Does Uggla have as many triples as doubles now?
4 to 3, doubles still lead.
Wow. An old school triple
Dan’s entry into third was a little better than his entry into third his last time on base.
Dan the man. Opp field… clean up in Joe’s drawers!
Congrats to Dan on clearing .200! Now only BJ’s left under the Mendoza Line.
Scout: B.J. Upton is a dead-red fastball hitter, with a .636 OPS against them this season and .564 against everything else. The unintentional humor value of Scout can be very high.
Come on BJ.
No way we don’t score here. We got this.
70 — Reverse reverse jinx?
70- Never, ever, EVER say that.
We’re not going to score here. The script is already written.
I was going for the reverse reverse jinx. Can it really get any worse with men on third?
It worked!!!
LOLSqueeze
Fredi learned his lesson last time. Bunt—and it worked! This means we will get more bunts in our future!
Again, a good time to do it. Already up 2-0. Want the run, but don’t need it.
Nice bunt, Reed.
Suck it, Trebek.
I really like Reed Johnson as a pinch hitter. He handles the bat well.
Andrelton pops up. In other news, the Pope’s still Catholic, and bears still do their business in the woods.
It makes me sad that *that* is the only way we can score.
This team just wets their pants when they get a man in scoring position.
Simmons and Heyward made well sure to keep the save in order there.
Smarter to squeeze with Reed than Success!Unexpected works.
WOW. CJ doesn’t make that play.
I love our D on the left side of the infield with Simmons and Janish both in there.
Isn’t Success day to day? He smacked the tar out of his shin with a foul tip on Wednesday.
If Janish could borrow some of Ramiro Pena’s magic pixie dust for his bat he could be quite useful.
Woooooo! Great win.
Ironic that we scored all of our runs off of guys we traded to the D-Backs for Justin.
Not even a single K, Craig?
Good win, good showing by Teheran again.
Good win. Great game by Julio. Day game tomorrow. Go Braves.
recapped…