Ted Turner died Wednesday.

Bobby Cox died today.

Same week. Same franchise. Two pillars of the same church, gone before the month is half over.

I don't know what you do with that. I'm not sure anybody does.

I came to the Braves late, and I came to them sideways, and I came to them because of a cable wire strung to a house in the hills of eastern Kentucky where a man who had spent his whole life listening to baseball on the radio suddenly had a choice.

My daddy was a Reds fan. Not because he loved Cincinnati, particularly. Because that's where the signal came from. On summer evenings he'd go sit in his old truck — not to go anywhere, just to sit — and pull in the Reds on that radio like he was coaxing something delicate out of hiding. The warm static, the announcer's voice floating in and out, the crack of the bat arriving a half-second late like an echo from somewhere better. That's how baseball was supposed to sound. Like it cost you something to receive it.

Then TBS showed up.

Ted Turner had bought the Braves in 1976, and he'd figured out something nobody else had yet — that satellite technology could throw a local signal clear across the country, landing it in living rooms in places like ours where the nearest big-league city might as well have been on the moon. All of a sudden, my daddy could see the game. Color picture. No static. Free.

He didn't know what to think about that.

Neither did I, honestly. Because what he'd loved wasn't just baseball. It was the ritual of going out to that truck. The crickets. The dark coming on slow. The game arriving like a rumor. TV felt too easy. Too bright. Like something had been solved that didn't need solving.

But he watched. We both did. And somewhere in there, without either of us deciding to, we became Braves fans.

Ted Turner was the one who hired Bobby Cox the first time, back in 1978. Fired him too, eventually, which Turner himself seemed to recognize as an error almost immediately. Turner told reporters at the press conference afterward: "It would be Bobby Cox if I hadn't just fired him. We need someone like him around here."

That's a quote that aged well.

Cox came back. As GM first, then manager again in 1990. What followed was 14 straight division titles, five pennants, and the 1995 World Series championship. The most sustained run of excellence any franchise had seen in modern baseball, and it happened on our television sets, nightly, on a channel a billionaire with a mustache and a big mouth had willed into existence through sheer audacity.

Turner was the showman. Cox was the church.

Turner would do anything to get your attention. He once put on a uniform and managed the team himself for a game in 1977 before the National League told him to sit down. He was a spectacle wrapped in a sport. But Cox — Cox was something else. Steady. Blunt. Loyal to his players the way a good foreman is loyal to his crew. He holds the all-time record for ejections in baseball history — 158 of them — which tells you everything. The man would go to war for his guys. Every time. Without hesitation. Without a speech.

He just stepped out of the dugout and made sure the umpire knew.

My daddy never fully abandoned the Reds. Old loyalties don't dissolve that easy. But he'd watch the Braves with us, and when October came around in the early '90s and Atlanta was in the thing every year, he'd lean forward in his chair the same way he used to lean toward that truck radio.

Same posture. Different light.

I think about that a lot this week.

Ted Turner built the machine that carried baseball into our house through a wire. Bobby Cox gave us a reason to keep watching once it got there. Between them, they converted a generation of mountain kids who had no business being Braves fans into people who groaned at Tom Glavine's ERA and argued about Chipper Jones and stayed up past midnight for Game 7s.

That's not nothing. That's not even close to nothing.

Turner was 87. He'd been dealing with Lewy body dementia for years, stepping further and further back from public life. Cox was 84, had suffered a stroke in 2019, and had been mostly out of the public eye since. Both men had lived full lives. Both had earned their rest.

That's what you're supposed to say, and it's true, and it still doesn't help.

Because somewhere tonight there's a kid who grew up watching those Braves teams on TBS, in a house in the mountains or the flatlands or the mill towns, and that kid is now a grown person feeling something they can't quite name.

Not just grief. Something older than grief.

The feeling you get when the last people who built the place you love are gone, and the place is still standing, and you're not sure who it belongs to now.

My daddy's truck is long gone too.

But I still know how to find a baseball game.