FREDDIE FREEMAN CLENCHED the baseball with his glove as he approached his jubilant teammates near the pitcher's mound at Houston's Minute Maid Park last week. He stuffed it in his back pocket amid all the euphoria, then hid it in his locker as the celebration continued. Freeman had lost the ball that went for the final out in the Atlanta Braves' pennant-clinching celebration 10 days earlier, and he was determined not to let that happen with the final out of the 2021 World Series.
This ball belonged to Brian Snitker.
"He means so much to this organization," Freeman said moments after a Game 6 victory over the Houston Astros. "He's put on every hat there is in this organization."
Snitker, 66, spent 35 years with the Braves -- coaching in 10 minor league cities, navigating 19 job changes -- before finally becoming their manager in 2016.
Just a few years earlier, he had suffered a major league demotion that nearly broke him.
"We thought that was it for him," Braves minor league hitting coach Greg Walker said. "It turns out it wasn't."
SNITKER WAS SIX years into his role as the Braves' third-base coach in 2013. He had finally established himself in the majors, then suddenly he was heading backward again. Two days after the Braves' season ended with a first-round playoff exit, Snitker was called into the office of then-general manager Frank Wren, who informed him he'd be returning to the minor leagues, this time to manage the nearby Triple-A Gwinnett Stripers. Snitker had become the fall guy. He was, as he often put it, "recycled" yet again by the organization to which he'd devoted his life.
"I always used to tell people that Brian would manage in the big leagues one day," Snitker's wife, Ronnie, said. "But when he got sent to Gwinnett I told myself, 'Maybe it's never gonna happen.'"
Snitker was annoyed and enraged, but also dejected and disillusioned. So he stewed. He sat on the back porch of his Snellville, Georgia, home with a close friend, and the two talked over beers late into the night, parsing through every one of Snitker's emotions until a resolution had been reached.
Eight years later, as Ronnie stood on the infield grass at Minute Maid Park celebrating her husband's first World Series title, her mind kept going back to that fateful conversation.
The man who sat with Snitker, Mark Layng, had met the family under dire circumstances. Ronnie's breast cancer had become so severe by 1993 that she sought a lawyer to help write out her will. She flipped through a pamphlet from the local church, found an advertisement for Layng's office and recognized him as the man who'd helped her walk up the aisle when her body was shaking too much from the chemotherapy. The Layngs and the Snitkers became close shortly thereafter. They raised kids together, spent weekends at one another's houses, and on that fateful night in October 2013, Layng acted as a critical sounding board for Snitker.
Snitker was a week away from his 58th birthday, at a time when teams were placing a premium on young, analytically minded coaches. A new career seemed impossible, retirement impractical. Snitker at times sounded convinced that he needed to leave the organization, but Layng, who became a prominent judge before he died of lymphoma last December, kept pressing on the importance of staying. The Braves' Triple-A affiliate played only about 30 miles away, which meant Snitker could remain close to his mother and his two children. What seemed like a tough break, Layng stressed, might ultimately be a blessing.
"I've gone back to that moment and thought about what could've changed if we had decided to do something else," Ronnie said by phone on Sunday. "You know, I didn't really tell Brian what I wanted to do because I was too hurt for him. But I was really glad that he stayed. And when he got to Gwinnett, he wasn't in the coaches' room anymore; he had his own office again with his name on the door and said, 'This is gonna be all right. This is gonna be good.' And it was. It was really good."
SNITKER WAS BORN and raised in Illinois -- where he was famously part of a book that chronicled the improbable success of his 1971 high school baseball team -- but has spent the past 45 years tied to the Braves and, mostly, Georgia. He lasted four seasons as a heavy-footed minor league catcher who didn't hit well enough until 1980, when the late Hank Aaron, at that point the organization's farm director, called to tell him he was a bad baseball player who might make for a useful teacher.
Snitker began as a roving instructor in 1981, then spent the next three years as a minor league manager in Anderson, South Carolina, and Durham, North Carolina. A one-year stint as a major league bullpen coach was followed by a season in Sumter, South Carolina, and yet another in Durham. Two more years as a major league bullpen coach were followed by 17 years through practically every Braves affiliate. Snitker went from Macon to Danville to Durham to Danville and Macon again. To Myrtle Beach, where he won back-to-back Carolina League championships, then Greenville and Jackson and Richmond and, after his run as a major league third-base coach, Gwinnett.
He was recently asked why he kept pushing.
"I don't know," Snitker said. "Guys that are in baseball, that's what we do. We fight through adversities. We grind. After a while, it's what you do. It's not who you are, it's what you do -- probably because you can't visualize doing anything else. You just keep fighting the fight and grinding through because you never know."
Snitker built a reputation as a players' coach who maximized talent through empowerment. He was steady through adversity and disarmingly honest in an industry that often lacked it. He was firm, especially at a younger age, but also approachable, embodying many of the same qualities as his mentor, Bobby Cox. Most of all, he cared.
Hall of Fame pitcher John Smoltz, who once nearly broke one of Snitker's kneecaps with an errant throw in a bullpen session, was nervous upon meeting him as a rookie in instructional league. Snitker struck him as an ardent disciplinarian, but Smoltz quickly found him to be "the softest, most easy-going guy you'd ever get to meet." Eddie Perez, the longtime Braves catcher who now works out of the baseball operations department, has viewed Snitker as a second father ever since his own dad died of cancer in spring 2002.
Mark Lemke, the Braves' second baseman throughout their dominant run in the 1990s, was a teenager when he first met Snitker in the mid-1980s. He was struggling to graduate past the lower levels, but everything changed when Snitker became his manager. Lemke began the 1986 season as the third-string second baseman for the Class A Sumter Braves and reached the major leagues by 1988. He credits Snitker, and the confidence he instilled, for "changing my whole career."
"He still had his own goals, and it never felt like those were put in front of what his main job as a minor league manager or coach was -- and that was to develop talent in the minor leagues and to take somebody, get the most out of them, and help them go towards making the major leagues," Lemke said. "You sit there and player after player who has been through his tutelage would go on to have big league careers, and then you say to yourself, 'Geez, he's still down there? He's still doing this? Twenty years? Thirty years?' You say to yourself, 'Is he ever gonna get his shot?'"
SNITKER'S DECISION TO accept the demotion to Gwinnett didn't take long to pay off. Less than two months into his third season there, on May 17, 2016, the Braves fired manager Fredi Gonzalez and named Snitker his interim replacement. Snitker's warm disposition and sturdy reputation made him an instant hit with his players. The next day, when he captured his first major league win, Jeff Francoeur, Kelly Johnson and A.J. Pierzynski surprised him with an impromptu beer shower in his office. The ensuing offseason, before the Braves went through the process of interviewing candidates for the full-time position, Freeman barged into the office of then-president of baseball operations John Hart and declared that Snitker needed to remain the manager.
The following summer, Hart yelled at Snitker in the clubhouse for his use of then-closer Jim Johnson, and veteran Nick Markakis, in just his third season with the Braves by that point, barked back, warning Hart against ever disrespecting his manager again. The Braves weren't any good that year. They finished 72-90, and the relationship between Snitker and then-GM John Coppolella became so strained that Snitker was expected to quit if he wasn't fired.
"It was done," Francoeur said. "The last day of the season, it was done. They were gonna bring in somebody else."
Instead, Coppolella resigned -- and was eventually banned for life -- over infractions committed in the international free-agent market. Seeking stability, the Braves kept Snitker and hired Alex Anthopoulos as the new GM, sparking a run of four consecutive division titles that culminated in a championship.
Anthopoulos has received a lot of praise for acquiring four impactul outfielders at midseason, a series of transactions that lit a fire under a languishing team. But Snitker's unceasing consistency has been cited as a major reason the 2021 Braves were able to overcome the loss of Ronald Acuña Jr. to injury and go from five games below .500 at the end of July to 5½ games ahead in the NL East by the end of September. His acceptance of analytical principles -- the defensive shifts that were incorporated at midseason, the aggressive bullpen usage that was prevalent in the playoffs -- helped the Braves continually defy the odds, most notably against the 106-win Los Angeles Dodgers in the NLCS. But his old-school approach to the clubhouse didn't hurt, either.
"His door is always open to talk to, but he doesn't come in with rah-rah speeches and things like that," Braves closer Will Smith said. "He knows we're pros inside that room, and we kind of police ourselves."
The Braves' chances looked promising early in Game 6, with Jorge Soler launching a baseball over the Minute Maid Park train tracks and starting pitcher Max Fried cruising. But Snitker spent most of the night fighting the urge to get ahead of himself; he had lived through too much disappointment to do so. When the Braves finally won -- and defeated an Astros team that employs his son, Troy, as a hitting coach -- he stood on a makeshift stage and said he still felt "numb."
After the champagne dried up and the media responsibilities were met, Freeman walked into Snitker's office and presented him with the baseball that went for the final out. Snitker, the first manager in franchise history to reach the postseason in four of his first five full seasons, placed it in a tube sock and stuffed it in his backpack. Soon, it'll be displayed in a home office filled with keepsakes from what has become a fabled career.
"It's an incredible story," Braves bench coach Walt Weiss said. "To now win a World Series, after taking that journey, it's storybook stuff."