Hank Aaron Is Helping Atlanta Braves Clobber Teams Through Brian Snitker

How great was Hank Aaron? Well, he died 16 months ago, but he remains among the biggest reasons the Atlanta Braves may never lose again.

They’ve won 14 straight games.

Oh.

Not that Hank Aaron.

In other words, this isn’t about the Hank Aaron who ripped 755 home runs, or who starred long enough to retain Major League Baseball records for career RBIs (2,297), total bases (6,856) and extra bases (1,477), or who fell just shy of unanimous entry into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

This is about the Hank Aaron who stopped playing following the 1976 season after 21 years with the Braves of Milwaukee and Atlanta and two more with the Milwaukee Brewers to become a talent expert and a gifted soothsayer.

Exhibit A: It’s been 33 years since Aaron was farm director for the Braves. Even so, this franchise that ranks 10th on the Forbes list of MLB team evaluations at $2.1 billion continues to prosper courtesy of the last guy Aaron hired.

Brian Snitker.

For many reasons, Snitker is baseball’s most underrated manager. He proves as much every time the Braves do something like, oh, say win the World Series, which is what they did last season, or go from struggling to streaking in a flash, which is what they’ve done this month after doing the same last year.

These current Braves kept crushing opponents by pounding the Nationals 8-2 Wednesday night in Washington D.C., and Snitker kept proving Aaron was omniscient about covering his ears more than four decades ago whenever members of the Brian Snitker Hater Club yelled in his direction.

“I can’t tell you how many times, how many people in the Braves organization wanted me to fire Brian Snitker over the years, saying, ‘He can’t do this,’ and ‘He ain’t that,’ but I wouldn’t listen to them, even though they kept saying, ‘Why? So why do you keep this guy around?’” Aaron told me three years ago.

I repeated Aaron’s words in my book called “The Real Hank Aaron: An Intimate Look at the Life and Legacy of the Home Run King.”

During our 2019 conversation, Aaron said he informed Snitker in 1980 during spring training that his shaky playing career as a minor league catcher was over. Then Aaron encouraged Snitker to coach in the Braves’ system. After he agreed, he accepted job after job for the franchise involving places in the middle of nowhere as a coach and later as a manager.

“I always told (the folks who wanted Aaron to fire Snitker), ‘Well, the reason I don’t fire him is because he’s good. He does a great job.’ He knows baseball and he knows how to deal with people the right way.”

At 66, Snitker has the same personality as he did at 26, at least that’s what Aaron suggested to me through the years: Warm, always leaning toward the positive, but never enough to make others dare to cross him.

Nevertheless, you get the feeling Snitker surrounded himself with enough enforcers on the Braves as assistants — ranging from former MLB managers Walt Weiss (bench coach) to Rob Washington (third base coach) — to remain everybody’s favorite uncle in the clubhouse.

Let’s fast forward.

Let’s zip past 2007 to 2013 when Snitker reached the major leagues as the Braves’ third base coach.

Let’s even skip over the three years Snitker served as Triple-A manager for the club, and let’s also forget this: He became interim Braves manager in May 2016 before he earned permanent honors in October.

During that stretch, Snitker’s Braves captured the past four National League East titles, and they made two trips to the NL Championship Series, and they won that 2021 world championship despite a slew of injuries and not moving above .500 for the season until early August.

Let’s concentrate on now, where the Braves are making the NL East-leading Mets squirm out of nowhere.

On May 31, the Braves were pathetic.

They struggled at the plate with men in scoring position, mostly because Braves hitters struck out more as a group than their peers. Braves pitchers ranked among the top five in the majors in walking hitters. The whole team was uncharacteristically sloppy on defense compared to previous ones under Snitker.

Not surprisingly, the Braves were tumbling in the standings at 23-27 to sit 10 1/2 games behind the Mets, but then Snitker did something that he told me he rarely likes to do.

During the summer of 2021, when the Braves looked nearly as raggedy as they did earlier this season, I asked Snitker if he resembled his mentor, Bobby Cox, the Baseball Hall of Fame manager who led the Braves to an MLB record 14 consecutive division titles, five NL pennants and 1995 World Series championship. Cox didn’t mind if players called a team meeting, but he resisted doing so himself.

Snitker said he was the same. You know, unless it was absolutely necessary, and this time, it was absolutely necessary on June 1 in Arizona when everybody’s favorite uncle stood in the middle of the room for a few words.

Now the Braves are 37-27, four games behind the Mets and look spiffy in every aspect of the game.

Good for Snitker.

Great for Aaron.