Who cares about Barry Bonds breaking Hank Aaron’s home run record, Alex Rodriguez hitting his 500th home run, or Tom Glavine getting his 300th career victory. A record of more significant importance was set this season that eclipses all of those milestones by far.

Bobby Cox, the venerable, crotchety and cantankerous skipper of the NL East’s Atlanta Braves has finally passed John McGraw for the most all time mamagerial ejections in baseball history Tuesday night. Home plate umpire Ted Barrett ejected Bobby Cox for arguing a called third strike on Chipper Jones to end the fifth inning in the Braves 5-4 victory at home against The San Francisco Giants. Bobby has been a good boy for almost 7 1/2 weeks without throwing a single ejectable tantrum, although Sunday night when the Braves were at Philly he came awful close to setting the record when he came marching out of the dugout to contest a call. I was at the game Sunday night and the Phillies, who are noted for their “boo birds” were chanting “Toss him out” among other things. This was the 132nd ejection of Mr. Cox’s career, surpassing the mark that McGraw set during his Hall of Fame career. Bobby Cox has long been known for his fiery demeanor on and off the field but his record speaks for itself, leading the Braves to 14 division titles (no wonder the Phillies fans hate him so much).

During a recent Braves telecast one of the announcers commented that Bobby’s wife cringes every time she sees him get up from the dugout because with thirteen grandchildren, one never knows how advanced their lip reading skills are and anybody who has ever watched Booby at work on the umpires knows there’s some expletives deleted in his presentation.

I personally think Bobby was waiting for Barry Bonds to be in the stadium in front of the home crowd to break the record. Actually the runour has it Bobby has a “bachelor pad” in the Braves clubhouse with a couple of huge flat panel TV’s and the MLB cable package that he retires to whenever he’s ejected at Turner Field. Even though he was forced to retire to his “bachelor pad”, I’m sure Bobby was happy that Chipper Jones doubled to deep left center in the bottom of the ninth to bring Willie Harris home to score the winning run.