While more and more teams are hiring young, inexperienced managers they think can relate better to their players, Brian Snitker proved it ain’t necessarily so.
Snitker, who turned 63 last month, was named National League Manager of the Year Tuesday, taking 17 of 30 first-place votes to outdistance Milwaukee Brewers pilot Craig Counsell, who finished first on 11 ballots, and Bud Black of the Colorado Rockies.
An Illinois native who never played in the majors, Snitker has spent a lifetime with the Atlanta Braves, mostly coaching and managing in the minor leagues.
But he was in the majors long enough to pick up valuable pointers from Hall of Fame manager Bobby Cox, whose Braves won a record 14 straight divisional titles from 1991-2005. Cox, still an advisor to the team, has coffee with Snitker before every home game.
Snitker started as a minor-league catcher who didn’t hit much (.254 with 23 homers in 780 at-bats) but had a way of winning friends and influencing people. He served several stints as a coach in Atlanta, variously serving in the bullpen and at third base, before the team asked him to take over the varsity after Fredi Gonzalez was fired with a 9-28 record in 2016.
Freddie Freeman, Atlanta’s All-Star first baseman, said that Snitker made an immediate impression when he first addressed the team. “He made us feel like we were 28-9 instead of 9-28,” he said.
Asked to return in both 2017 and 2018, Snitker proved the perfect guy to reverse a record for real instead of in conversation. The Braves went from 72-90 in 2017 to 90-72 in 2018, thus becoming the first team since the worst-to-first Braves of 1991 to win 90 games immediately after losing that many three years in a row.
Although he's one of the oldest managers in the majors, he’s flexible enough to try new ideas. One big one, he said, was his full-blown acceptance of analytics, an idea introduced to Snitker by Alex Anthopoulos when he became Atlanta’s new general manager last fall. All of the players received daily worksheets detailing the trends and probabilities of pitching, hitting, and fielding against each rival.
Pegged to finish no better than third in the National League East, the Braves jumped off to a hot start and led the division, challenged only by the Philadelphia Phillies, for most of the summer. They finally finished eight games ahead of the Washington Nationals, the only other NL East team to win more than it lost.
Snitker pushed the right buttons all season, plugging power-hitting rookie Ronald Acuna, Jr. into the leadoff spot after Ender Inciarte and Ozzie Albies failed; juggling a pitching rotation that got victories from the league’s only three 20-year-old starters; and balancing a bullpen that blew 20 saves mainly because it yielded too many walks. He also got unexpected good years from Nick Markakis, who made the All-Star team for the first time in his 14-year career, and Johan Camargo, a smooth-fielding third baseman who collected 19 home runs, many of them timely.
Acuna, who hit a club-record eight leadoff homers (two of them in one day), won the National League’s Rookie of the Year Award Monday, taking all but three of the 30 first-place votes.
Snitker, now signed through 2020 with a club option for 2021, credited Cox and coaches Walt Weiss and Ron Washington, both former managers themselves, for his success. Even though the Braves won only one game in the NL Division Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers, the pilot proved the value of loyalty. He joined the Braves in 1977 and never left, personifying the image of Organization Man.
Counsell, on the other hand, played for five different teams during a 16-year career as a big-league infielder. He won World Series rings in 1997 and 2001, when he was Championship Series MVP for the Arizona Diamondbacks.
He joined the Brewers as manager in 2015 but enjoyed his best success this past season, when his team overcame a five-game September deficit to tie the Chicago Cubs in the NL Central and force a tiebreaker, which the Brewers won. After Milwaukee swept the Colorado Rockies in the Division Series, they took the powerful Dodgers to a full seven-game NLCS before bowing out.
Christian Yelich, acquired from the Miami Marlins before the season started is the odds-on favorite for the National League MVP award, to be announced Thursday.
Unlike Snitker and Counsell, Bob Melvin maneuvered his team into the 2018 playoffs even after his pitching staff suffered a bigger meltdown than Chernobyl.
Injuries that wiped out the projected rotation forced Melvin to deploy Edwin Jackson, Trevor Cahill, and other journeymen rejected elsewhere while leaving heavily on a powerful bullpen. Coupled with timely hitting, the power of home run king Khris Davis, and Gold Glovers at the infield corners, Melvin maneuvered his Oakland A’s into the postseason picture with 97 wins. But the team lost the winner-take-all game against the Yankees to qualify as the wild-card entry.
The 2018 A’s were the first team to reach the playoffs after starting the season with the lowest payroll in the major leagues. Shades of Moneyball!
Melvin also won Manager of the Year honors from the Baseball Writers Association of America with the 2007 Arizona Diamondbacks and 2012 Athletics.
Melvin, 57, is the sixth man to be Manager of the Year in both leagues. This year, his A’s won 22 more games than they had the year before, when they were worst in the West.
Oakland’s manager since 2011, he has won more games for the A’s than any pilot not named Connie Mack or Tony LaRussa. The Northern California native has managed in the majors for 14 years after catching in the big leagues for 10. He was once called “King of Platoons” by outfielder Josh Reddick because of his reliance on righty-lefty match-ups.
Melvin finished ahead of Alex Cora, who won 108 games with Boston in his first season as a manager, and Kevin Cash, who guided underrated Tampa Bay to a 90-72 season in a division dominated by two 100-win teams, the Red Sox and Yankees.
Baseball awards season continues Wednesday with the naming of the Cy Young Award winners and Thursday with the unveiling of this years MVPs.
