Atlanta Braves Name John Coppolella General Manager

Sep 30, 2015; Atlanta, GA, USA; General view of the field before the Atlanta Braves host the Washington Nationals at Turner Field. Mandatory Credit: Jason Getz-USA TODAY Sports

As first reported by MLB.com’s Mark Bowman, the Atlanta Braves are shortly to announce that the term ‘Assistant’ will be removed from John Coppolella’s title: he will be the team’s official General Manager going forward.  John Hart will remain as President of Baseball Operations.

2PM EDT UPDATE:  And here’s that announcement:

Bowman’s story on this announcement can be read here, though the next question will be this:  what will change for the Braves?

• Not much:  While John Hart technically was hired for the role, he has leaned heavily on Coppy for day-to-day operations in that office, plus much of the “heavy-lifting” (Bowman’s words) regarding the past year’s trades… and ‘out of the box’ thinking.
• More Face Time for Coppy.  Over this past year, Hart has generally been the one answering the questions, conducting the interviews, and being the face of the Braves’ front office.  I would expect this to change now – not to the exclusion of Hart, but certainly Coppolella would step forward into the light much more often.  That’s good – we still don’t have any photos of him that we’re allowed to use!

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Back in August, we reported on a story that the Brewers were sniffing about to see if Coppolella would be interested in coming to Milwaukee.  I opined at the time that this promotion would happen at year’s end to insure that he would be retained.  Clearly, that’s now the case.

Didn’t take a rocket scientist (though technically, I have been one in the past) to figure this was coming, though:  it’s the way of the sports industry.  We see it in college football a lot:  a well-liked coach at a University gets a couple of inquiries and suddenly he gets a longer-term deal to stay with a big bump in salary.

Bowman noted in his column that Houston was interested in making Coppolella their AGM back in 2009… and that’s the title he ended up getting from (then) GM Frank Wren.

It’s Not All Peaches and Cream

It should be noted that John Coppolella’s tenure isn’t going to be without error… bad things happen with everybody from time to time.  Our Brandon Woodworth reminded us of this after the announcement became public this afternoon:

You can check his timeline for more on that, but the message is this:  Coppolella has been at the center of the action that has revitalized this club from top to bottom over the past year.  He’s been there, been ‘doing that’, and is still learning… and frankly, you can easily make ‘mistakes’ in this industry while still having done the right thing.

Who could have predicted that Mike Foltynewicz would have ended up in an emergency room with blood clots and had a rib removed?  It makes that trade look more dicey, but it doesn’t mean the deal was wrong, either.

Nonetheless, we offer our congratulations on the promotion to new General Manager John Coppolella.

Go get ’em!