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"FacebookPinterest\n\nnot long before the first game of a late-July home series against the Cardinals, Chipper Jones finally emerges from the players' lounge in the clubhouse of the Atlanta Braves. He strides to his locker, pulls on his Braves cap, and faces the crush of reporters that has awaited him for more than two hours.\n\nIt's been a bad few days for Jones and the Braves. The team has just lost a crucial weekend series to the Philadelphia Phillies, and Jones himself has just been placed on the disabled list with a hamstring strain. Eight other Braves are also injured, including the team's top three starting pitchers. The celebrated Team of the '90s is effectively out of the pennant race, and it isn't even August yet.\n\nAt his locker, Jones gazes blankly into a TV camera and, in a morose whisper, answers for his team's wretched season. He reiterates the fact that the Braves have endured a ridiculous number of injuries. \"We can't\u2026expect to stay competitive,\" he says. \"There's three teams in front of us in the division. The likelihood of all three of them collapsing is not probable.\"\n\nThe next day, in an increasingly jittery Braves clubhouse, reliever Will Ohman, whose name has been ubiquitous in trade rumors, paces nervously in a pepperdine football T-shirt, the back of which reads still underrated, except that Ohman has placed white tape over the word underrated and replaced it with the word here. Teammates surreptitiously study the ESPN crawl; at this point, any healthy body on the roster could be shipped out. When the star slugger Mark Teiira briefly appears at his locker, I try to speak with him, but he big-times me for the second time in two days. \"I got some things going on right now,\" he grunts. It turns out he isn't bullshitting. Hours later the team announces it has traded Teiira, its best young player and most prolific home-run hitter, to the Los Angeles Angels. It's a stunning moment. The front office is now dismantling the roster and rebuilding for the first time since 1990, the year they drafted Chipper Jones. The dynasty that until 2005 won fourteen consecutive division titles is dead.\n\nJones meets me that afternoon in the Braves' auxiliary clubhouse, an empty locker room that's used for press conferences. Dressed in his home whites for the photo shoot scheduled to follow our conversation, he looks momentarily sheepish wearing what is, for a player on the DL, basically a costume.\n\n\"Every year, coming out of spring training, I've thought we were gonna win the division,\" he says. In 2005, Jones voluntarily restructured his $120 million contract so that the front office would have a bigger war chest. Since then, Atlanta's payroll, which typically ranked in the top five during the '90s, has fallen to as low as sixteenth. Does he feel the Braves have kept their end of the bargain? \"They've tried to make this team better,\" he responds. \"If I thought any differently, I would have raised Cain.\"\n\nEven as his team founders and his body is falling apart, even as he's being forced to consider the possibility, after eighteen years as a Brave, of finishing his career with another team, Jones is having an MVP-caliber 2008. For much of the season, he was flirting with .400, a feat no switch-hitter has achieved since 1894. At press time, his .362 average was the highest in the major leagues (the single-season record for a switch-hitter in the modern era is .365, by Mickey Mantle in 1957). And this year, he became the first switch-hitter ever to have 400 home runs and a lifetime .300 batting average. Jones, 36, is finally getting the recognition he'd have had long ago if he'd played in Chicago or New York or Boston. For the first time, he's no longer overshadowed by Atlanta's Big Three pitching aces, all of whom are now either dispersed or disabled. And he's no longer haunted by the fuck-ups of his early career, for which the media torched him, and because of which he refused for years to take part in long conversations like this one. Most ballplayers view introspection as an enemy of the emptied mind their psychologically demanding job requires. What's fascinating about Jones is that he's sustained a rich inner life while making himself, over two decades, into one of the top five third basemen ever.\n\npicked first overall in the 1990 amateur draft, Jones roared into his first minor league season draped in gold chains, at the wheel of a black Corvette. Before he'd ever played a major league game, he was referring to himself in the third person. In his first full season, the Braves won the World Series; he batted .364 in the playoffs after hitting .265 in the regular season. \"Two sixty-five isn't that bad,\" he announced, \"but I still think I'm a .300 hitter in this league.\" (He was right: Over the next twelve seasons, he'd bat .300 nine times.)\n\nHe would also try to assert himself in the clubhouse, twice criticizing the team's play, only to be \"aired out big-time,\" he says, by manager Bobby Cox and some of his teammates. \"They had conversations with me about \u2018the way it's done here.' And okay, I learned from it. I won't say another word. And I haven't. That's one of the reasons I'm not the vocal leader that some fans in Atlanta want me to be.\" With an ironic smile, he says, \"I'm what the Braves have made me.\"\n\nWith the Braves' success, Ted Turner began his failed campaign to market them as \"America's Team\" on his cable network, TBS. In a decade when steroids made the game irresistibly long-ball-centric, pitching defined the Braves. The team's Big Three\u2014Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, John Smoltz\u2014were smug, aloof, lily-white; they looked like charter members of a country club that would never let in the likes of you. And how could any nonsoutherner root for a grown man called Chipper? It was like the name of some grotesquely stunted Tennessee Williams character.\n\nIn Atlanta, though, Jones's self-assurance, unflappability, and regular postseason appearances would earn him the moniker \"the Derek Jeter of the South,\" and that's also a good way to understand the effect he had on Braves fans. \"Teenage girls shriek his name the way their mothers once shrieked for\u2026the Beatles,\" the Atlanta Journal-Constitution gushed. But Jones's rise to baseball superstardom coincided with what he calls a \"very public divorce.\" He broaches the subject of his personal travails gradually, beginning with the World Series of 1996, his second full season, which the Braves were leading two games to none before they collapsed. The loss still eats at him.\"That was the only year of the fourteen straight division titles where I look back and say that we had the best team.\"\n\nHis marriage to Karin Fulford, whom he'd met when he was 19, was already in trouble, he says, and he began having affairs. \"I was going to do what I wanted, no matter what, in order to make myself happy, everybody else around me be damned. A lot of that was pent-up anger. Here I am thinking I'm going to start my career with two or more World Series championships, all of a sudden you get kicked in the gut. I was a first-class jackass, to be honest with you.\"\n\nIn October 1998, he and Karin announced that Jones had fathered a child out of wedlock with a waitress at Hooters with whom he'd had an eighteen-month-long affair. Jones and his wife spoke frankly about their difficulties to the media; Jones even honored a previous commitment to appear on a call-in show on an Atlanta radio station and took questions from listeners for three hours. \"I wanted people to know that as a man I stood up, and I took everybody's heat head-on,\" he says. \"I'd gone through a period before all this where I would come to the park and I would see the signs\u2014chipper's awesome; chipper for president; blah blah blah\u2014and I'm like, \u2018If these people knew what I had done, would they feel the same way?' I didn't want to be a hypocrite anymore.\"\n\nOut of loyalty to Karin, Jones had promised not to see his child, a boy named Matthew. \"A child out of wedlock, that's awfully hard for the other person to live with every day. She struggled with it\u2014\" he falls silent for a moment\u2014\"a lot.\" Four months later, the Joneses filed for divorce.\n\nImmediately after moving into his own apartment in downtown Atlanta, Jones arranged to meet his 11-month-old son for the first time. \"I was waiting in the hall outside of my apartment, and they got o the elevator. [Matthew's mother] had his hand, and he waddled off. I started bawling. You talk about a shot of reality. Here I am, Mr. Johnny All-American\u2026 It just drove home what needed to be done, and that was to do everything I could to make sure that I was there for him as much as possible whenever he needed me.\" As he says this, Jones wipes his eyes.\n\nBut spring training began just weeks later. \"The only way I could get away from what was being said in the media was to shut everybody out,\" he says. \"I would get to the park at one o'clock and would do nothing but watch film and hit\u2014and before you know it, that's ten, eleven hours of the day in which you don't have to think about what's going wrong in your personal life. And then you go home and sleep, wake up, and start it all over again. You can call it denial, but it was the best remedy for me, because I'm a guy who's very sensitive about what people think about me.\"\n\nTwo months after filing for divorce, Jones asked the Fulton County court to legally recognize Matthew as his son. (He has since remarried and now has three younger boys as well.) \"There are some things I would have done differently,\" he says. \"Obviously, I would not have stood by for the first eleven months of his life. It might have sped up the process with my ex-wife and myself. It might have had the opposite effect, for her to learn to love him like a son.\u2026 I don't know.\"\n\nDavid O'Brien, the beat writer for the Journal-Constitution, says the episode rankles some southerners to this day. \"With most rational fans, he's a god here,\" O'Brien says. \"In the Bible Belt, though, there is a certain segment of the population that will never forgive him.\" When I mention Alex Rodriguez and the public airing in New York of his alleged infidelities, Jones defends him. \"Even in his own ballpark, they boo him sometimes. A lot of people are very jealous of him and want him to fail. It's because he's not a true Yankee.\" He brings up Mickey Mantle, whose troubled personal life was publicly revealed only decades after his retirement\u2014\"probably because he had a lot of people protecting him,\" he says. \"If Jeter was going through the same problems A-Rod's going through, you wouldn't hear it, because Jeter is revered more like Mickey Mantle than A-Rod would be.\"\n\nIn the season that followed his public confession, the fans' heckling was brutal, he says. \"You hear some of the vulgar things that come out of people's mouths and you realize how anger fuels the whole world. Whatever ammunition I give the fans, that's my fault, and I take responsibility for it. But when it's because you're beating the daylights out of the home team, that boggles my mind. But part of being a pro athlete, or a good one, anyway, is your ability to tune out all that stuff and focus on what your job is.\" Call it inspiring, call it cold-blooded, but Chipper Jones hit .319 that year, with forty-five home runs, and won the National League MVP. Even now, he says, \"out of every six or seven jeers, there'll be something about, \u2018Hey, Chip, you want to go to Hooters after the game?' \" He waggles his finger and grins: \"I go, \u2018No, no, no!' Just to let them know that I heard them and I'm past it.\"\n\ntoday, jones is the oldest position player on the Braves. He mentors his young teammates quietly\u2014\"Outspoken is not the word I'd use to describe him,\" says his teammate Matt Diaz\u2014and otherwise keeps to himself. \"He loves his solitude,\" O'Brien says. \"Sometimes we can see him in the players' lounge, playing cards while everybody is stretching and dressing. He'll play solitaire for a straight hour without looking up.\"\n\nHis teammates marvel at his photographic memory for pitches. \"He can face a guy ten years ago and not face him till today, and he can tell you everything he did to him. It's extremely weird,\" says catcher Brian McCann. Second baseman Kelly Johnson recalls a crucial at-bat late in a 2005 game against the Brewers: \"I'd never seen the pitcher before, but Chipper said, \u2018He'll throw a fastball, but he's not trying to throw it for a strike. So if you're patient and you get ahead 2-and-0, he'll throw his changeup.' Sure enough, fastball: ball one. Fastball: ball two. Changeup\u2014I hit a homer.\"\n\nJones describes a variety of ways he gains an advantage at the plate. For instance, sign stealing \"goes on all the time,\" he says. \"Guys on second, if they pick up what set of signs the catcher's using, we'll relay it one way or the other to the hitter.\" And he informs me that a shocking number of major leaguers tip their pitches. \"I would say if you face seven pitchers in a week, four to five of them are doing something that gives them away.\" He talks about how for nearly a decade he owned one pitcher, a former frontline starter for the Astros named Shane Reynolds. \"I was watching film on him one day, and I saw that he was holding his glove differently when he threw his split, his fastball, and his curveball. I hit .400 o him, lifetime, because I pretty much knew every pitch he was gonna throw.\" Eventually, Reynolds was traded to, of all places, Atlanta. \"I walked over to him and introduced myself,\" Jones recalls. \"I said, \u2018How are you doing? I'm Chipper. Nice to meet you. You're tipping every pitch.' And he sat there with his mouth open for like ten seconds. I said, \u2018Every pitch. And we need to fix it.' I took him into the video room and showed him, and it was like somebody had shot his dog. He was devastated that for the last ten years he had been tipping his pitches.\"\n\nThat night, just as the game's getting started, John Schuerholz, the legendary Braves ecutive, sits down with me in the back of the press box. Slight and professorial, with Ross Perot's prominent ears and deceptively kindly demeanor, Schuerholz, 68, is largely responsible for the success of the Braves of the '90s.\n\nJones, Schuerholz says, \"has been the face of this franchise virtually since the time he ascended to the major leagues.\" Over the shouts of the crowd, I ask him if ownership plans to increase payroll, which might give Jones another chance at a championship. \"I don't want to connect those two inquiries,\" he says, \"because they're not directly connected.\" He says the team is \"very comfortable with where our payroll is now. I must tell you,\" he adds, \"those who watched us play in spring training said, \u2018This team is gonna win the East.' \"\n\nAt the end of 2009, Jones will be a 37-year-old free agent. The cost-conscious Braves may hesitate to spend millions of dollars on an aging player who missed well over one hundred games between 2005 and 2007, as Jones did. \"He's suffered leg pulls far more often than he'd like,\" says Schuerholz, \"and far more often than we would have preferred.\" He suspects Jones's time on the DL will even weigh on the minds of Hall of Fame voters. \"Some might wonder if he's played enough. But with what he's done as a switch-hitter, I think he gets in.\"\n\nWill he play for the Braves in 2010? \"Whether we can sign him is not just a function of our desire or our want or our hope,\" says Schuerholz carefully. \"It's a function of what his expectations become. We have great admiration for him, and we recognize clearly what his value is to this team. And we will measure that against what we believe to be his real, true ability to continue to function at that level. The reality of our business begs that we recognize the fact that it would be a really unusual development if he were to remain here.\"\n\nthe next day, Jones meets me fresh from the batting cage. When I ask him how his hamstring feels today, he answers tersely: \"Good.\" His cheek bulges with chewing tobacco, and at irregular intervals he spits neatly into a cardboard cup.\n\nThe auxiliary clubhouse has been commandeered by drug testers making a surprise visit, so we sit down in Turner Field's visiting-wives' lounge. Inevitably, we talk about performance-enhancing drugs. In July, The New York Times reported that the decrease in positive steroid tests that Major League Basebell touted before a congressional panel in 2005 was based on less than half a season's results. Jones, though, says he's certain PED use has declined. \"I was just talking about this in the clubhouse with [journeyman pitcher] Buddy Carlyle, who spent eleven years in the minor leagues or overseas playing baseball. Now you're starting to see guys who, without being enhanced, can't make it here in the big leagues. And you're seeing guys like Buddy Carlyle getting their opportunity.\"\n\nJones says he finds it sad that Barry Bonds, who still wants to play, can't get a job. \"You don't know how many guys he played against revere him. When he walks up to the plate, he might see one hittable pitch the whole game. And when that one guy who has ego enough challenges him, he kills it. To have the patience, the eyesight, the hand-eye coordination to be ready for that one guy truly amazes me. He's the best player I've ever seen, steroids or no steroids.\"\n\nI ask him about Roger Clemens. \"I have never had to work so hard just to put a ball in play against a particular pitcher the way I have against him. But Bonds and Clemens have the cloud following them. That's what makes me proud to have been Greg Maddux's teammate, because he's done it the right way.\"\n\nBaseball Prospectus projects Jones to be highly productive until at least the age of 40. He tells me he wants to play \"two, three, four more years.\" It's not hard to imagine an AL team\u2014the Yankees?\u2014vigorously pursuing him to be their designated hitter. \"I would really need some time to think about that, not that I would go Brett Favre on it,\" he says. \"Heck, I've seen it happen. The Braves traded Hank Aaron, they traded Dale Murphy, icons in this town. So I know my day is going to come. I'll play as long as I have the desire, and if it's not in an Atlanta Braves uniform, that's very unfortunate. But I would have to go somewhere where I have the chance to win. I'm not going to a last-place team just so I can hit 500 homers.\"\n\nJones says he believes he's \"on the cusp\" of Hall of Fame viability. \"A lot of people say that offensively the benchmark is 3,000 hits. They say it's 500 homers,\" he says. \"I don't know that I'll reach either one of those.\" I ask if he feels that playing in Atlanta has denied him the recognition he's due at this point in his career. (Says Matt Diaz, \"If he played in Yankee Stadium, people would be calling him the greatest switch-hitter of all time.\") \"I think it has prevented me from getting more recognition,\" Jones says levelly. \"What is fair recognition and what is not is debatable.\"\u00A0\n\nDespite the turmoil of his first few years in the game, Jones has been a baseball player to the core, but not at the expense of being a complicated human being. \"I think I've gotten better with age,\" he says. \"I went through so many problems at home early in my career that hurt my game. This game is all about status, it's all about stature. It's all about where you've been and what you've been through.\"\n\nnate penn is a GQ staff writer."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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