Chris Whitfield: One of the game’s best

Sports

Discussion

July 7, 2012

Chris Whitfield: One of the game’s best

The Dalton Daily Citizen Sat Jul 07, 2012, 06:16 AM EDT

In the summer of 1991, I left Savannah and enrolled at Middle Georgia College in Cochran, which was roughly 30 minutes down the road from Macon.

My friends and I spent quite a few evenings piled into my 1988 Toyota Corolla hatchback to catch games at old Luther Williams Field. A home to professional baseball since 1929, I had played in Luther Williams as a high schooler and had been especially enamored with the stadium after seeing it in the classic Negro Leagues baseball movie, “Bingo Long’s Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings.”

With its covered grandstand, loud organ music, a railroad track just on the other side of the right-field fence and its cheap minor league prices, Luther Williams was a great destination for a bunch of guys stuck in a three red light town with nothing really to do in the dorms after we got done with Dr. Gibson’s U.S. History I class.

But the real reason we made so many trips to Macon was to see a hot young phenom named Chipper Jones.

In the sports reality of free agency, Larry Wayne Jones is a statistical anomaly akin to winning the lottery. So few athletes spend their entire professional career with one team. Guys like Chipper and Derek Jeter just aren’t the norm nowadays with agents winning free-agent contracts left and right and players chasing money more than anything else.

Playing for the Macon Braves in the South Atlantic League in 1991, Chipper Jones was in his first full year of professional baseball, and the expectations were already high.

He had been taken by the Braves in the 1990 Major League Baseball June Amateur Draft out of Bolles High School in Jacksonville, Fla., and even though he struggled in an abbreviated Rookie League season with the Gulf Coast Braves, he was still rated in the top 50 of all prospects heading into the 1990 season in Macon.

In the field, he was horrendous that season with 56 errors in 135 games at shortstop, but at the plate, you could tell he was something special for a 19-year-old. Jones batted .326 that year with 15 homers and two shy of driving in 100 runs. Heading into the next season, Baseball America had rated him as the No. 4 prospect in professional baseball.

He was always a crowd favorite in Macon, and that would continue throughout his career in Atlanta despite a few foibles in his personal life. Now, it can easily be said that he is the face of the franchise. While names like McCann and Freeman may have a bigger impact on the team’s overall success and the future of the organization, this is still Chipper’s team.

I always enjoyed going to the park near the Ocmulgee River in 1991, and Jones was the biggest reason.

The next season he would move up to play at Durham and then at Greenville before making his Major League debut in 1993. After a rocky start — tearing his ACL in spring training before the 1994 season — he burst back onto the scene in 1995, helping the Braves win the World Series that year.

Since then, he has been an Atlanta fixture.

Earlier this week, it was announced that Jones would be playing in his eighth All-Star game, and for a guy who turned 40 earlier this year, he is trying to go out with a bang. He has already announced his retirement after this season, and for a generation that grew up with Chipper as a fixture in the lineup, it is hard to imagine an Atlanta Braves team without No. 10 on the field.

For me, it is just another reminder of getting a little older since I will also turn 40 this year, but I will surely hold onto those earlier years when I got to see Chipper when he first started.

Chris Whitfield is a sports writer for The Daily Citizen. Write to him at chriswhitfield@daltoncitizen.com.

Text Only

Sports

Search Results

Discussion

Chris Whitfield: One of the game’s best

Site Map

Contact Us