Atlanta Braves fans… buckle up: it’s gonna be a wild ride

I like the hire… but be prepared to be happy with future deals and also mortified… with the possibly of both emotions at the same time.

It has been said that in a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, the hen is “involved” with the process, but the pig is “committed.”  Ladies and gentlemen, after the hiring of new Executive-Vice-President-and-General-Manager-Alex-Anthopoulos the Atlanta Braves are now committed.

There’s new faces in the Front Office – the last hires of the Coppolella regime (including former Jays exec Perry Minasian).  There’s a new GM.  John Schuerholz won’t be around, except for ceremonies.  John Hart will be placed in house arrest at the golf course.

In short, it’s just about as clean of a break as you could ever imagine – particularly given that there’s a couple of Hall of Famers involved.

3 weeks ago (and the last time I referred to breakfast meats in a post), I suggested that Braves CEO Terry McGuirk needed to “step up and assert his authority” in this whole affair.

It appears that he has done so.  The Braves aren’t usually a group to make symbolic statements, but it was hard to not notice that there were exactly 2 people on stage today:  McGuirk and Anthopoulos.

Sure – some words were said today about the icons of the past… and there was some “past” presence:

To be sure:  some of that “Old Guard” were also present for the GM interviews (source:  AA interview tonight on XM/MLB Network Radio)… but at this point, if I were any of those advisors, I wouldn’t worry about my phone ringing too much with “Alex” on the caller ID.

This is a guy who ran the show in Toronto for 6 full seasons.  But when ownership there opted to hire Mark Shapiro as team President, Anthopoulos saw this as a sign of things to come and resigned less than 2 months later… despite being offered a lot of Canadian coins to stick around.

So for the Braves – all obstacles have been removed:

I spoke of that “committed” thing?  4 years committed – that’s the length of AA’s initial contract with Atlanta.  So the team’s run from this point will be inexorably tied to Anthopoulos’ handling of the new talent that he’s been given.

Here is part of his interview from MLB Network Radio, cited above.   This is his answer about what he might have heard about upcoming penalties to the team:

https://twitter.com/MLBNetworkRadio/status/930249843993399296

Anthopoulos now has many weapons at his disposal and will have few excuses.  Coppolella’s tenure was short and had several questionable moments (obviously), but he was effective in putting together a team that brought home some… bacon… that will be instrumental to a lot of future success.

Next: Braves Choose Their New Leader

If Anthopoulos doesn’t trade it away.