CHICAGO -- Bill Bartholomay was strolling through the cramped visitors clubhouse at Wrigley Field last Monday, stopping by lockers, shaking players' hands and asking how they were doing.
You don't see many executives in clubhouses any more, but the 89-year-old chairman emeritus of the Braves seemed right at home.
Bartholomay may be a dinosaur in baseball, but he stays young by staying connected to the game he loves.
A Chicago insurance executive who has been in the game for 56 years, Bartholomay bought the Milwaukee Braves in 1962 and opened the south to the sport when he moved them to Atlanta in 1966.
He's certainly the only man in baseball who has known every commissioner, dating to the first one, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis.
Bartholomay was a boy when he met Landis on summer trips with his family to former Cubs owner P.K. Wrigley's estate in Lake Geneva, Wis. Now he's hanging with 20-year-old Braves star Ronald Acuna.
If anyone has seen it all, from players' strikes to the Steroid Era to bullpenning, it's the man Braves players refer to as "Mr. B."
He watched the Braves become "America's Team" in the 1970s after Ted Turner took control and put them on his superstation, and now he is watching the latest owners, Liberty Media, try to execute a rebuild with a young core surrounding veterans including Freddie Freeman and Nick Markakis.
It has been a difficult rebuild for the Braves, who have lost 90-plus games every season since 2015. But Bartholomay doesn't look at it that way.
"It's still baseball, so it's not a tough time," he said. "Every game is new. Seems like we're on the right track. We'll see."
The game Bartholomay came into during his first season as an owner in 1963 and the one he's witnessing now don't have a whole lot in common. In truth, the game in 2018 doesn't even have much in common with the baseball of a decade ago, thanks to modern usage of starters and bullpens based on analytics.
"The game is so different now with everybody on 100-pitch limits," he said. "And you have to play the sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth innings like they're one of a kind.
"The whole thing is different. I had Warren Spahn."
Spahn, the Hall of Fame pitcher for the Braves, never entered a start he didn't expect to finish. He threw 382 complete games over a 21-year career, almost all with the Boston and then-Milwaukee Braves, including a 16-inning duel with the Giants' Juan Marichal on July 2, 1963, in San Francisco.
Spahn was 42 and Marichal was 25. Neither would budge, and Marichal wound up throwing 227 pitches, to Spahn's 201. Marichal and the Giants prevailed, 1-0.
"Greatest ballgame I've ever seen," Bartholomay said. "A Candlestick Park special. Both he and Marichal went the whole way, and Willie (Mays) hits a home run in the 16th to win it."
Imagine a manager letting a pitcher throw more than 200 pitches today. He would be tried, convicted and sentenced to a life of abuse in the Twittersphere, if not fired on the spot after the game.
Bartholomay and I talked about Shohei Ohtani, the two-way star for the Angels, and he agreed Spahn could have been a two-way player in this day and age. Spahn hit 35 career home runs as a pitcher despite missing three seasons from 1943 to 1945 while serving in World War II.
"He was in Normandy," Bartholomay said. "People don't realize that. He was some kind of guy."
Is baseball changing for the better, or is it just a natural evolution of sports?
"I think it's evolution," he said. "Social networking changes everything. Everything is stats and analytics and conditioning. ... How you play, how you travel.
"And there's a big rush to get to the big show. There's not an extra year in Double A. If you're good, you come in quick. That's a big difference. Look at what the Cubs have done. It's amazing."
As for all the rebuilding being done around baseball, he couldn't say whether it's just a phase or a new way of life in an old game.
"The game itself is sound," he said. "What I like about it is the kids are playing it. You don't hear much about soccer moms anymore. Girls are in Little League. This is good stuff. You see it in our fan base. The millennials like to come to our ballparks."
Sports on 05/21/2018