I’ll start here: I didn’t think I’d get to write it this way. I was frustrated and critical of Brian Snitker all year, and especially frustrated by his wavering at the end of the season over whether at all to announce his retirement. I was afraid he’d want to stay too long and the team would just go with it, and I aired those fears over and over.

Instead, the team announced he’d be moving upstairs – announced it in such a way that it wasn’t immediately clear just whose idea it was, honestly, but I’ll leave that to one side – and I’m doubly happy: happy to get to celebrate Snitker’s legacy for what it was, and happy that we’ll be able to get a clean start next year.

Brian Snitker will turn 70 in a little over a week, and he’s spent a half-century with the Braves organization.

Back then

He grew up in the other Macon – the one that’s in Illinois outside of the other Decatur, due south of the Dekalb they pronounce wrong – where his high school had something of a Hoosiers story that got written up in a book called One Shot at Forever that I’ve bought but haven’t read yet. From high school, he went to junior college, then to the University of New Orleans; his nearest team, the Cubs, drafted him in the 25th round, but he decided to stay in school for his senior year. After graduation, the Braves brought him in as an undrafted senior sign in 1977. They’re the only employer he’s ever had.

He was a catcher, of course, like so many future managers. I don’t quite understand the way they handled him as a prospect in the minors – after spending the rest of 1977 in rookie ball, they jumped him three levels in 1978. My suspicion is that they viewed him as an org player and just moved him around wherever they needed an extra catcher’s glove. He never hit very much, but the team clearly saw something in him, as they sent Henry Aaron to break the news to Snitker that while he was finished as a player, they wanted to keep him as a coach.

Coach

Aaron was only a couple of years removed from his own playing career, shortly into a front office career with the Braves that would be extraordinary in its own right. Two of his proteges were among the more successful managers of their era: two-time world champion Cito Gaston, and potential future Hall of Famer Dusty Baker. Brian can hold his head high among that company.

After getting the message from Aaron, Snitker spent the next several decades bouncing between minor league levels with occasional stints in the big league clubhouse: from 1982-87, for example, he managed in Single-A, except for 1985, when he came up to be the big league bullpen coach, a position to which he returned from 1988 to the beginning of 1990.

He spent a few years as a minor league coach then returned to managing, which he did for a decade from the mid-’90s to the mid-2000s, when he was once again called up to the bigs to be Bobby Cox’s third base coach, a position for which he became pretty unpopular around here: he so frequently seemed to wave men to get thrown out at home that Mac added a Glossary entry for baserunners getting “Snitker’d.”

In 20 seasons as a minor league manager between 1982 and 2016, Brian Snitker had an overall record of 1347-1367, personally managing most of the key Braves prospects over that period, from Ron Gant, Jeff Blauser, and Mark Lemke, to the Baby Braves, to Jason Heyward and Freddie Freeman.

Skipper

Then finally, finally, Fredi Gonzalez richly earned a midseason firing with a 9-28 start to the 2016 campaign, and the 60-year-old Snitker got his first big league managing job. Over his decade in the manager’s chair, he distinguished himself remarkably: a 811-668 record, 143 games over .500, fourth among active managers, and a .548 winning percentage that’s fifth among active managers with at least 500 games managed. With 24 postseason games won, he’s sixth among active managers.

In his ten seasons, he won one Manager of the Year award (2018), and also finished third an additional three times, and finished fourth twice. He may have been a late bloomer, but from the moment he took charge, he was immediately recognized as being among the best of his peers. He’ll always be compared to Bobby Cox, his mentor, and that’s not an easy comparison for anyone, but he’s easily the second-best manager we’ve ever had.

His best skill, for quite a while, was his ability to get the players to all pull together, stars and fill-ins, veterans and rookies, healthy and injured, all believing in the next man up. Because he’d managed so damn many of them in the minors, he’d known them man and boy and they loved him, truly wanted to run through a wall for him. He had the steady even keel the Braves have prized for decades, but he inspired a passion in his men that Fredi Gonzalez simply never could.

Brian and Bobby

An underrated skill of his, though, I’ve always felt, was his hook. Bobby was a players’ manager, known for writing his players into their roles with a Sharpie pen and for sticking with his starters to ride through the lumps. Snit was famous for sticking with Will Smith through a terrible few months in 2021, and his faith paid off brilliantly in the 2021 postseason. But generally, to my eyes, he often had a much quicker (and saner) hook than Bobby, particularly in the playoffs.

One of Bobby’s favorite moves was the double switch, a strategy mostly outmoded by the designated hitter. Snitker’s variation on the theme was the late-inning replacement, frequently rotating through the extra outfielders on the rosters that Alex Anthopoulos assembled for him.

On the other hand, Bobby routinely platooned his players – frankly, he did it to a fault, as he wasted quite a bit of Ryan Klesko’s potential value and gave thousands of worthless at-bats to Keith Lockhart – while Snit presided over a clubhouse that emphasized playing every single day, with Freddie Freeman and Dansby Swanson as the moral enforcers of the unofficial policy. I tend to think that this exacerbated a lot of players’ nagging injuries and contributed to the injury-driven roster breakdown in 2024 and 2025.

A few years ago, baseball-reference introduced stats to track managerial tendencies, so we can track Snitker’s style against that of his peers. In general, Snit’s teams stole bases somewhat less than average, but he used pinch runners more than average; clearly, he didn’t want to give away outs on the bases, but he also was eager to get a speed advantage in late innings. His teams sacrifice bunted much less than average – again, an unwillingness to give away outs – but he also used pinch hitters somewhat less than average. And he used a precisely league-average number of pitchers. He won a little over half of his managerial challenges. He sure didn’t get ejected much, but the former is a lot more important than the latter.

The modern game

In general, for a baseball lifer who bounced around leagues and roles as much as he did, I think Snitker was an old-school guy who displayed a lot greater flexibility than he regularly got credit for. Baseball has changed a lot over the past few years.

(One example was posted by Baseball-America’s JJ Cooper last night on Bluesky:

We just finished the 4th inning of tonight’s Cubs-Brewers game. This game has had 35 100 mph pitches. That’s more than were thrown in the ’08, ’09 or ’10 postseasons.

From pitch clocks and ghost runners to spin rates and launch angle and to torpedo bats and oversized bases, the game looks a lot different than it did in Bobby’s day. (Bobby was an innovator, too – he and Tony La Russa more or less invented modern bullpen specialization – but Snitker arguably had to contend with an even greater pace of change.)

Not very long ago, there was a cartoonish culture clash, illustrated by the blog Fire Joe Morgan and the movie Moneyball, between crotchety veterans who couldn’t abide any particular kind of change in the game and still believed that doing the little things is what won championships, and you can still hear a version of that get-off-my-lawn philosophy in John Smoltz’s color commentary. Brian Snitker simply was not that kind of alter kacker.

Quo vadis

The Braves are going to embark upon a managerial search for the first time in a very, very long time; Fredi Gonzalez and Brian Snitker were both promoted from within and specifically selected for their abilities to be successors to Bobby Cox. It’s long past time for the Braves to look beyond their own organization to ensure that they’re able to broaden their perspective.

The last time they conducted a full external search, they landed with general manager Alex Anthopoulos, and while I’ve criticized him a bit more lately, he has inarguably been a wildly successful choice. I was over the moon at the time, and I could hope for no better outcome than a managerial candidate who is as good as AA has been in the front office. The Braves are not quite at a crossroads, but the team has been spinning its wheels for a couple of summers, as much of the current core has played beneath their career norms, while players like Orlando Arcia, Jarred Kelenic, and Michael Harris II have comprehensively failed to make any offensive progress in the past two years, to the point that the first two are no longer in the organization.

The most important thing the next manager will do is hire a coaching staff around him. At his best, Snitker had a rare gift for bringing out the best in his players and inspiring them to reach the peak of their potential, and that is what I hope his successor will be able to do.

But for now, he rides off into the sunset after five decades of service to the franchise, during which time he has meaningfully contributed to essentially every good moment we’ve enjoyed since the team left Milwaukee.

How would I sum up Snitker’s career? I’d do it with his favorite expression.

“Really good.”