Early Professional Career
Jones signed with the Atlanta Braves organization as a free agent in 1993 at the age of 16. Jones would be promoted to Danville of the Appalachian League after only 27 games with the Braves farm team in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Jones would play for Class-A Macon in 1995. In his first at bat, he belted a homer. He would finish the season with 25 home runs and 100 runs batted in. Jones also led the South Atlantic League with 56 steals. His outstanding season was capped off when he was named Minor League Player of the Year.
The Braves brought Jones up to Atlanta on August 15, 1996, when he was just 19 years old. In his first career Major League game, Jones went 1 for 5 with a run batted in and a runs scored. In his second game, he went 2 for 5 with a home run and a triple. He had his first multi-homer game against the Reds on August 22. He spent his early time in the majors playing in right field because established center fielders Marquis Grissom and Kenny Lofton were already entrenched in the position. He would finish the season batting .217 with 5 home runs and 13 RBIs.
In the National League Championship Series against the Cardinals, Jones batted .222 with a home run and 3 RBIs. The Braves would win the Series and advance to the World Series.
In Game 1 of the 1996 World Series on October 20, 1996, Jones was able to demonstrate his talents on the national stage. He connected for two home runs to left field on his first two at bats as the Braves routed the New York Yankees 12–1. Jones became the youngest player ever to homer in the World Series at the age of 19 years, 180 days, breaking Mickey Mantle's record of 20 years, 362 days - on what would have been Mantle's 65th birthday. Jones joined Gene Tenace as the only other player to hit home runs in his first two World Series at bats. Tenace did it in 1972 with the Oakland Athletics.
Read more about this topic: Andruw Jones
Famous quotes containing the words early, professional and/or career:
“The girl must early be impressed with the idea that she is to be “a hand, not a mouth”; a worker, and not a drone, in the great hive of human activity. Like the boy, she must be taught to look forward to a life of self-dependence, and early prepare herself for some trade or profession.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“In European thought in general, as contrasted with American, vigor, life and originality have a kind of easy, professional utterance. American—on the other hand, is expressed in an eager amateurish way. A European gives a sense of scope, of survey, of consideration. An American is strained, sensational. One is artistic gold; the other is bullion.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.”
—Jessie Bernard (20th century)