This story was excerpted from Mark Bowman’s Braves Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.
When Brian Snitker enjoyed his 1,000th career game as a Major League skipper on Thursday night, it was again time to celebrate a journey that has taken the beloved manager farther than he, and most everyone else, had come to expect.
“I never even expected to [manage] one [game],” Snitker said.
Snitker’s story has been well-chronicled, starting with Hank Aaron giving him his first coaching/evaluator job after releasing him as a player in 1980. The baseball lifer spent the next 40-plus years serving as a coach, manager and instructor for the Braves at the Major League and Minor League levels. He felt like a scapegoat when former general manager Frank Wren demoted him from big league third base coach to Triple-A manager after the '13 season.
Snitker thought about leaving the only organization he ever knew, but he never wanted to end his days with the Braves. His loyalty was rewarded six weeks into the 2016 season, when he was named Atlanta’s interim manager. At 60, he had realized a dream that had died a few times over the previous four decades.
Nearly seven years later, Snitker is still savoring the dream that most expected would last just a few months.
The 2016 season ended with Freddie Freeman and Nick Markakis making it clear they wanted Snitker to continue serving as their manager. Former president of baseball operations John Hart and former general manager John Coppolella provided an additional year and then spent most of the second half of the following season making plans to find the club’s long-term manager.
They didn’t want Snitker, and quite frankly he didn’t want to work with them anymore. Remember the night Coppolella complained about the Braves skipper not pinch-hitting Matt Adams for Matt Kemp in the ninth inning of the opener of a meaningless season-closing series in Miami? That’s when Snitker called the clubhouse staff in Atlanta and said to pack his bags.
Three days later, MLB revealed an investigation that led the Braves to clean house and bring Alex Anthopoulos in to run the baseball operations department. Anthopoulos and Snitker have since formed a working relationship that's produced nothing but success.
Since spending the 2017 season seemingly as a lame duck, Snitker has won five straight National League East titles, one World Series and one National League Manager of the Year Award. He’s just 32 wins from becoming the third-winningest manager in franchise history.
It’s safe to say the man who was supposed to keep the big job for just a few months has earned the right to do it more than 1,000 times.