By that fall, Snitker, then 24, had hit his ceiling as a player: four years in high school, three in college and now four in the Braves’ minor league system, playing in Southern outposts like Kinston, N.C.; Savannah; and, most recently, Durham, N.C.; where he’d made $750 for the season as a Class A catcher and first baseman.
In that moment, he could have avoided all that followed: the life of 12-hour bus rides, missing entire seasons of a child’s school sports, working on one-year contracts—the nights sleeping on a training table, the decades chasing his big league dream, only to have it snatched away over and over.
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Kevin D. Liles/Atlanta Braves
Snitker could have gone back to school, earned his degree and lived a normal life, one where he knew where he’d be in 12 months’ time. Instead, for better or worse, he chose to push on—to keep grinding, believing in a destination that seemed more and more unreachable the older he got. Meanwhile, the game evolved, becoming the province of analysts and MBAs until a man like Snitker—an old-school baseball lifer, lacking in artifice and terrible at self-promotion—felt like someone from another age.
But the world works in mysterious ways, and now, to the surprise of most everyone in baseball, Snitker is in his sixth year as manager of the Braves, having led them to three consecutive NL East titles and, last season, to within one game of the World Series. At 65 he is currently the fourth-oldest manager in MLB and the one initially hired to the job at the oldest age. “I’m not sure I could have gone through what he did,” says Mark Lemke, the former Atlanta second baseman who came up in the minors under Snitker. “Actually, I know I couldn’t have.” Greg Walker, the longtime Braves hitting coach, is convinced his friend’s life should be a movie.
Indeed, those who hear Snitker’s story—of unlikely encounters and crushing heartbreaks, of persistence and futility, of unexpected mentors and flashes of glory—tend to be either inspired or mystified. Some want to know how he did it. Others want to know why he stuck with it.
Had you met Snitker at age 13, chances are you wouldn’t have projected a bright future in baseball. Not especially agile or strong, he wore thick glasses and was so slow-footed that high school teammate Steve Shartzer would say, “There’s dead people that can outrun him.”
But Brian had loved the game since he was 6 years old, when he’d swing a bat in his backyard in Macon, a rural outpost of 1,200 in the middle of Illinois. His father, Dick, worked as a salesman for Pabst Blue Ribbon and, later, Jim Beam, which meant the Snitkers always had the best-stocked rec room bar in the county. It also meant Dick was on the road four to five days a week. So Brian, whom everyone just called Snit, played catch with his mom, Catherine, or banged balls off the brick wall at Macon High.
It was there that Snitker met the first of a string of men who’d shape his managerial approach, a young English teacher turned baseball coach named Lynn Sweet, who had moved to town from Chicago. To the consternation of many in Macon, Sweet wore his hair long, taught progressive books and had a habit of empowering his players. He let them choose their positions and steal at their own discretion. He also thought sports should be fun. When he filled out a form about the Ironmen for a nearby paper, for team weaknesses Sweet wrote: coaching.
The Macon boys wore peace signs on their hats, grew their hair out, played Jefferson Airplane during warmups and began winning at a heady pace. At the time, there were no class divisions in Illinois high school ball, so when the Ironmen took the district title in 1971, Snitker’s sophomore year, nearly every playoff game lined up as a mismatch. And yet Macon, with an enrollment of 250, won the sectionals to qualify for the all-comers state tournament in Peoria.
The experience opened Snitker’s eyes to a broader world—big-city press coverage, college stadiums, major league scouts. Defying the odds, Macon advanced to the semis and, in a game that would be etched in state high school lore, took down Chicago’s Lane Tech High, a baseball powerhouse with 5,200 students, becoming the smallest school in Illinois history to advance to the state finals.
That the Ironmen lost in the finals did little to blunt the achievement; when Snitker and his teammates returned home that night, they found the roadway in Macon lined with townspeople. (In 2010 I’d write about this season, for Sports Illustrated, and later in a book, One Shot at Forever, which is when I first met Snitker.)
For many of the boys, that season would stand as a high-water mark of their athletic careers. Not Snitker. Two years later he headed to Lincoln (Ill.) Junior College, then to the University of New Orleans for two seasons before leaving to sign as a free agent with the Braves in 1977. His career peaked at Triple A in ’78, when he had four hits—all singles—in 12 at bats. Within a couple of years, he had dropped all the way back to Class A, fighting to keep his batting average north of the Mendoza Line.
Which brings us to the fall of 1980. Released by the Braves, Snitker had no Plan B and, he says, “really no other passion than baseball.”
And then he got a call from Hank Aaron.
Under Snitker, who won the NL 2018 Manager of the Year award (opposite), the Braves have won three straight division titles.
Under Snitker, who won the NL 2018 Manager of the Year award (opposite), the Braves have won three straight division titles. Mike Zarrilli/Getty Images
We all have inflection points in our lives. Snitker had two pretty much back-to-back. First came that call from Aaron, the Braves legend and, at that time, MLB’s home run king. Aaron had recently been installed as the team’s farm director. He’d heard Snitker was good with people and offered him a gig as a roving instructor in the low minors. It wouldn’t be glamorous. He would sleep on couches, lug bags and throw BP, all for the princely sum of $14,000 a year. Snitker jumped at the chance.
Not long afterward, Snitker met Veronica “Ronnie” Sylvester while on a blind date set up by his roommate, former big league outfielder Cito Gaston. They had little in common. Ronnie worked as a speech pathologist at an elementary school and was vegetarian. Brian dipped tobacco and had never met a burger he couldn’t inhale. Yet the two hit it off and, much to the chagrin of the Catholic Snitkers, soon moved in together. “You might want to experience this life first before we actually do it,” Snitker told her. “It’s not for everybody.”
Ronnie decided that it was for her, or at least that Brian was. They began a winding minor league adventure. The following spring, Snitker got a job managing the Class A team in Anderson, S.C., and then, a year later, the Class A Durham Bulls, leaning on Aaron for advice as he went. Snitker must have done something right, because in 1985 the big club called him up as a bullpen coach. These were the Braves of Ted Turner’s heyday, led by outfielder Dale Murphy and broadcast nationwide on the TBS Superstation. Turner lived large, serving bison from his Montana ranch at team dinners and sitting behind the dugout during games drinking beer, shirtless if the weather was hot. When the staff held meetings about the roster, the coaches knew what was coming. “By the time you got downstairs,” recalls Snitker, “Ted had already told the players what everybody was saying about them. He couldn’t help himself.”
In what would become a pattern, just as Snitker gained momentum, he lost it. The next season, the Braves hired Chuck Tanner as manager and, as managers often do, he brought in his own guys. Atlanta sent Snitker back to manage Class A Sumter and start at the bottom again.
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Courtesy of the Snitker family
Snitker has had stops as a manager at Class A Durham (1984) and Macon (’97).
Snitker has had stops as a manager at Class A Durham (1984) and Macon (’97). Courtesy of the Snitker family
When Bull Durham came out, in 1988, it lent a certain romance to the minor leagues. The reality, Snitker was learning, was far from it.
Managing came with no security and little pay; he made $17,500 managing Class A Durham in 1983, getting up to $27,500 there four years later. The couple became adept at making do, especially once their firstborn, Erin, arrived in December 1986, followed two years later by a son, Troy.
Often, the Snitkers were on the move. They bought the first of three Chevy Astro vans, which Ronnie jury-rigged into traveling homes. She saved matching packing boxes, placing a sheet over them to serve as an end table. They strapped a TV atop a milk crate and attached a VCR to create a rudimentary car entertainment system for the kids on long drives. “We looked like the Clampetts drag
ging stuff around the Southeast,” says Snitker.
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