A Hard Winter for Chipper
A Hard Winter for Chipper
Lake Buena Vista, Florida -- For perhaps the first time in his life, Chipper Jones last winter declined to talk about it.
He let the phone ring through the night when he didn't like what he saw in the caller ID screen. He and wife Karin visited the North Georgia mountains. He and buddy Jeff Foxworthy went to Texas to hunt. But mostly, Chipper Jones gave up being Chipper Jones for a winter, because the quick answers and the swagger just weren't there anymore.
"I knew there were a lot of outstanding questions that were left to be asked of me that I kind of just wanted to avoid," Jones said. "I think that was really the first time in my life I've gone out of my way to avoid having to talk. I went through a period there where I didn't want to see my name in the paper. I just wanted to end last season and put it behind me mentally."
That will send a snicker through some quadrants of the National League, where the Atlanta Braves are viewed as haughty and bloodless and Jones as their high priest. St. Louis manager Tony La Russa wondered aloud if the Braves had a mirror in the clubhouse, since no one in there ever seems to take a look at himself. Jones, who had gone to the World Series in his first two major league seasons, escaped last October like a fugitive, a clown on the basepaths, chastened even in his own town.
"My patience has never been tested, as long as I've been in the big leagues," he said. "I've been lucky, up until that point, that I've never picked up the paper in Atlanta and had to read negative print about me. That part of it hit me kind of hard."
Come November, "I just tried to live life in relative anonymity as much as possible."
Jones hit .344 last postseason with three home runs and seven RBIs in nine games. He did not commit an error. He'd finished his third year in Atlanta with a career-high 111 RBIs, the first Braves third baseman since Hall of Famer Eddie Mathews to record consecutive 100-RBI seasons. And when he hit spring training, it seemed to some that none of that ever happened.
"Chipper probably worked harder than any of them in the offseason," said manager Bobby Cox . "He was down here real early. I think he thinks he had a bad year."
The second week of October saw to that. In Game 1 of the NLCS with Florida, Jones could not glove Moises Alou's hopper down the line, the double driving in three runs that foreshadowed the entire series. In Game 3 and Game 4, he was twice thrown out when caught off second base, uncertain of advancing on singles by Fred McGriff. Combined, the three plays didn't lose the series but they said as much about the Braves' play as anything could.
The injury was added to insult when he was struck in the head by a batting-practice liner off Greg Colbrunn's bat. Jones had talked all September about "doing some damage" in the postseason. He is regarded as the club's best base-runner. All those did was register him in a class for humility. The mere mention of his base-running still brings him straight out of his chair, his winter of suppression suddenly ended.
"That probably gets to me more than anything," he said. "You're going to make errors and I realize that. Yeah, I should have kept [Alou's] ball in the infield. Whether I make the play or don't make the play, only one run should have scored. Those three runs set the tone of the whole series.
"But the base-running really got to me, because not only did I mess up doing something that comes so naturally to me and I'm so good at. Not only did I mess up once. I turned around on the exact same play the next night and did the same thing. It makes you wonder if it was meant to be.
"Those things, I don't do those things. Something as fundamental as base-running and getting thrown out like that twice, I mean, that might happen to me once in two years. And it happened twice in two nights. It was something weird. it was like an out-of-body experience. I was looking down on this guy and he's messing up time and time again. I don't know."
Jones took his place at third base this week to find a completely new infield around him from Opening Day a year ago. Startled by the free-agent departure of shortstop Jeff Blauser, Jones' role on the club is shifting, even as he watches the days pass.
"There's a changing of the guard going on around here," pitcher Tom Glavine said. "There's no question about that."
Where does Jones fit now?
"Do I go out and put a big `C' on my shoulder and call myself captain of this club?" he asked. "No, I would never do that. But I think my going out there every day for 160 games and having the pressure of hitting third in the lineup and playing third base, driving in or scoring runs like I do on offense, some of that responsibility is going to fall on my shoulders."
By Thomas Stinson, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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