This story is part of Peak, The Athletic’s desk covering the mental side of sports. Sign up for Peak’s newsletter here.
John Smoltz is a former major-league pitcher who is a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame. He played for manager Bobby Cox for almost 20 years with the Atlanta Braves. Cox is fourth all-time with 2,497 wins and was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2014. Cox, 84, died on Saturday.
There’s no player in the history of the game who was impacted more by Bobby Cox than me.
He was the general manager of the Atlanta Braves who traded for me in 1987, and then he became my manager for almost 20 years with the Braves.
In the 1991 season, I was 2-11 and headed nowhere. The cries for sending me down to the minors or moving me to the bullpen were getting louder and louder. Bobby just didn’t pay attention to it. He kept staying with me — he just knew that I would turn it around.
He gave players confidence when they had zero. He just had this quality about him that said to you: I believe in you. You’re going to get this done.
I did and the rest is history.
I learned so much about leadership from Bobby and his style. He had consistency. He treated a 19-year-old the same as a 40-year-old. It didn’t matter what your resume was; he made you feel special. And he made it clear what you were going to be asked to do. He didn’t sugarcoat. He didn’t lie. He’d just tell you: This is the way it’s going to be.
If you acknowledged it and accepted it, you were going to have a great run.
He had three simple rules:
- Wear your hat right. Don’t cover up the “A” on the front.
- Show up on time.
- No music in the clubhouse, bus or plane. Wear your headphones.
That’s it. Those were his only three rules.
They were so simple that sometimes you questioned whether they were stern enough. But they were so effective because there was no BS around them. There was no reading between the lines. Basically, what he was telling you was: Guys, I’m not asking you to do a million different things. Just work and play. Be prepared.
Eventually you realized: All I have to do is show up for this man and do the things he’s asked me to do, and then you want to run through a wall for him.
Sometimes a new player or a young player would come along and try to push or violate those rules. And I’m telling you, we pounced on them. We would be ready to fight.
That’s because when you have such a good system, you police it. If anybody questioned the rules and asked: “Really, it’s this simple?”, we’d tell them, “Yeah, it’s this simple. Show up and be ready.”
Think about those three rules in essence. If you break them down, what he was saying was this:
You’ve got to look the part.
You’ve got to be the part by showing up on time and being a great teammate every day.
And don’t cause any distractions for your teammates while they’re getting ready to do their job on a daily basis.
The rules reflected the simplicity of Bobby.
We had the greatest spring training in the history of spring training. Bobby didn’t believe in doing time-killer stuff. He didn’t keep pitchers there all day. Get in, get out. He believed that if you were motivated to get out, you were going to do your work at a much better rate than if you had to be held there just because.
We call it eyewash in baseball. That means doing something just to do it.
The pitchers who played for him took a lot of grief from our teammates because we’d go play 36 holes of golf every day. But we never skipped out on opportunities to work, and we backed it up with our performance on the field. We were in to work at 6 or 6:30 every morning and would be done at 10 or 10:30 every morning.
He made note to everybody that had a problem with it: This is what’s going to happen. Deal with it because we’re going to win because of them. And they’re doing their work.
It took a new player a minute to get used to Bobby’s spring training. They were like: “This is it?” And we were like: “Yep, this is it. Now, do your work.”
I’d tell them, “Why do you think I’ve been here all these years?”
He knew the game was super, super hard. You weren’t going to be in his doghouse very much if you did the right things.
During the middle of a game in 1998, he took out Andruw Jones, our young superstar center fielder. Andrew misplayed a ball, which he rarely did, and from the dugout, it looked like he may have been jogging after it (I don’t think he was).
Bobby pulled him. He kind of made a spectacle. Embarrassed him. You could see everyone’s mouth kind of open, going: Oh, wow.
When that happened, that spoke to every player: It doesn’t matter who you are. If you do not play the game a certain way — the way Bobby expected you to play it, by his rules – you are not above coming out of the game, getting embarrassed and benched.
That spoke to his leadership from action. He didn’t need to yell. He just made a point and that point was well-received throughout the entire team.
And I promise you this: Andruw Jones never, ever went after a ball without the full effort that Bobby expected.
— As told to Jayson Jenks
