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2014 Baltimore Gameday HQ Round 2

but they only won one World Series.’ Yes, World Series wins, obviously, are important and we wish we’d won more. But I’ll argue that winning 14 straight division titles, and in Bobby’s case, you go back to Toronto, 15 straight division titles, that’s something that’s never going to be done again. To be the guy that led that says a lot about Bobby and how good he was at getting his players to do what he knew they were capable of doing and doing it year after year. It was one thing for us to win in ’91, when nobody expected us to, another thing to win in ’92, when we weren’t a Cinderella team anymore. But to go out there and win year after year when everybody’s expecting you to and everybody’s wanting to knock you off, just go ask the Washington Nationals how tough it is to repeat. It’s a really, really difficult thing to do and Bobby was the key guy in all of that. He was such a calming influence in the clubhouse, he was so great in getting the most out of guys and also getting what was expected out of guys. It’s one thing, either as a team or as an individual, to have that kind of breakthrough season. It’s another thing to establish yourself as being capable of doing that and then doing it year after year. Bobby, both from an individual standpoint and from a team standpoint, was able to get guys to do that. It’s so much because of his personality and how he treated guys and how he went about his business and how he expected us to go about our business. GDHQ: What do you remember about pitching against teams managed by Tony La Russa and Joe Torre? GLAVINE: Those are the guys you like playing against. Tony always had the reputation of being that genius in the dugout, that he was a great strategist and he was always trying to outmaneuver the guy in the other dugout. From a player’s standpoint, you knew that and you wanted to try and compete against that and do what you could as an individual to take some of those managerial options away from him. I don’t know Joe all that well, but my sense is he’s an awful lot like Bobby. It seems like the guys that played for Joe loved playing for him. They loved playing for him because of the way he treated them and how he went about his business with them. It just seems to me that he and Bobby are very, very similar in that regard in terms of the respect that the players had for them that played for them. It’s hard to get everybody to like you as a manager but it seems to me that when you’re talking about Bobby and Joe, you’re talking about the high-90 percentile of guys who enjoyed playing for them and that says a lot. ROB KIM/GETTY IMAGES GDHQ: What do you remember about Frank Thomas? Did you ever get to face him? GLAVINE: I did face him. We had a little bit of interaction in interleague play. Ed Note: Thomas and Glavine went head to head in one Interleague game, on June 21, 2002, when the Atlanta Braves beat the Chicago White Sox, 3-2, at Turner Field. Thomas went 1-for-1 off Glavine, a sixth-inning single, with two walks in three plate appearances. Glavine pitched seven innings and left with a 2-1 lead, but got no decision, thanks to Thomas’ gametying RBI double in the eighth. I always liked Frank as a person. Watching him play and not really knowing him, I liked how he went about his business. He was never a guy that you looked at and rolled your eyes when you heard him say something. He seemed to be a straightforward guy and a fierce competitor. When I had the opportunity to meet him this winter when the announcements came out, he was everything that my perception of him was and more. As we were talking about with me earlier, having had an opportunity to look at Frank’s numbers now, he was a lot better player than I thought he was. I can tell you that.


2014 Baltimore Gameday HQ Round 2
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