The Braves announced Friday that they’ve signed manager Brian Snitker to an extension through the 2025 season. He’d been entering the final guaranteed season of his contract. The Braves previously held a 2024 option on Snitker, but they’ve now preemptively exercised that and tacked another guaranteed year onto his deal.
It’s familiar territory for Snitker, who has signed a handful of short-term extensions since taking over the dugout midway through the 2016 season. An organizational lifer who has spent more than four decades with the franchise, he stepped into almost immediate success as skipper. Snitker won the NL’s Manager of the Year award by his second full season at the helm after overseeing an 18-win improvement between 2017-18.
That 2018 campaign saw the Braves win 90 games and an NL East title. It kicked off a stretch of five years (and counting) atop the division, one which has seen the club play at a 90-plus win pace in four of those seasons (including the shortened 2020 schedule). The lone exception, an 88-73 showing in 2021 that looked like a relative “down” year for the franchise, was more than salvaged in October. Despite carrying the worst regular season record of any playoff team that season, Atlanta knocked off the Brewers and Dodgers before winning a six-game World Series over the Astros.
It was the Braves’ first World Series win since 1995. The club rewarded Snitker by exercising a 2023 option on his contract a year early. They didn’t replicate their playoff success last season but had their best regular season showing in nearly two decades. Atlanta won 101 games, topping the triple-digit mark for the first time since 2003. An otherworldly second half was capped off with a late-season sweep of the Mets to all but clinch the division, erasing a deficit that had reached as high as 10 1/2 games at the beginning of June. Unfortunately for Braves’ fans, it was the third-place Phillies who made the deepest playoff run, with Philadelphia eliminating Atlanta in four games during their Division Series.
More to come.
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