Brian Snitker’s 2016 baseball team is, by any objective measure, rather a mess. (Just Google major league standings or statistics).
Simply eyeballing Snitker’s 1971 team, the Macon (Ill.) Ironmen, you would have thought it similarly ill-equipped for the fray. But they wrote a book about that team.
High school baseball at that time in that sparsely peopled part of central Illinois was not a flashy production. The Ironmen, for whom Snitker was the sophomore right fielder in ’71, never dressed for success, and yet found it anyway.
Their baseball britches sagged and were tattered around the fringes. As for their uniform tops, what a mismatched set of laundry — different type size on the school name or no name at all, just a stylized “M.”
They had no team cap, and when rule-makers began objecting to their use of Caterpillar tractor caps, saying it amounted to inappropriate advertising of a big local employer, the boys covered up the company name with white athletic tape or peace signs. And played on.
Rich Schultz
Brian Snitker looks on from his lofty new vantage point — the dugout roost of the Braves manager. (Rich Schultz/Getty Images)
“We actually heard people laughing at us. You’d hear, ‘Oh, nice uniforms, dudes,’ said Lynn Sweet, the coach of this unfashionable collection, now 74 and long retired to his non-working farm.
“It was funny. We didn’t care. In fact, I think it kind of hurt the people (who were laughing at them). They came to conclusions about a country team that we just couldn’t perform. But we could.”
Oh, yes, the Ironmen’s coach — well, we’ll get to their coach. Because the man who was one of the first major baseball influences on the man now (interim) managing the Braves provided an outlook unlike almost any other you’ll encounter on the organized playing field.
A 15-year-old Brian Snitker, top left, with helmet, poses with the rest of the 1971 Illinois state runner-up Macon Ironmen. The … read more
Nearly two weeks ago it was big news in that other Macon when Snitker got his battlefield promotion from Triple-A to manage the Braves in place of Fredi Gonzalez. There at the crossroads where Cardinals’ and Cubs’ allegiances intersect, Braves news was everywhere. It made the front of the sports page of the Decatur Herald & Review. Got some air time, too, on WAND Channel 17.
“You’re talking about a little town of 1,200 and a boy like Brian making it all the way to the big leagues — that’s awesome,” Dale Otta, the senior shortstop on the 1971 team and a devoted caretaker of its history, said.
“I am extremely pleased. My wife is. Everybody up here is,” Sweet said. “Not so much that it gives us extra cachet or anything. We just like him so much and we’re happy for him.”
Hey, the Braves can use fans wherever they may find them these days.
Before Snitker began his 40-year odyssey with the Braves — from undrafted free agent to every kind of coach imaginable to manager for the moment — he was an Ironman.
The Braves manager came from a place so far removed from the daily pressures and intricate details of major league baseball as to be almost another galaxy.
Where Snitker first learned the game was a place that had such a pure relationship with the game that nothing else really mattered. His 1971 season, in which a 12-man team from a high school of 270 students made it all the way to state finals against a Goliath from the Chicago suburbs, inspired one very good baseball book, “One Shot at Forever.”
(Footnote: It was Snitker who made the last out in the 4-2 loss to Waukegan in the championship game; although, with other concerns now, he seems to have gotten over the sting).
This was a time before schools were subdivided by size — one postseason fit all — making this a sort of baseball version of the “Hoosiers” saga. A couple of attempts to start up a movie project on the book have fizzled.
Snitker didn’t learn that baseball was a game to be hammered into the player’s skull through the hard shell of the batter’s helmet. It instead was a game to be joyfully absorbed, experienced with all the pleasure of a good meal.
Sweet coached like he taught, always looking for the alternative method to the tired, standard drill. Combine that with his long hair and his drooping moustache, and it was little wonder that a lot of the Middle Americans in the stands referred to him as a hippie.
“We don’t emphasize fundamentals. We just let them have fun. There is really not much I could tell them. They’ve all played a lot of baseball and know the game as well as I do,” Sweet told a clutch of reporters during tournament time in ’71, as recounted in the book.
As Sweet says today, “I didn’t regard myself as a prototype high school coach.”
The kids didn’t call him Coach or Mr. Sweet or even Lynn. Just Sweet. They all called him Sweet.
Long before every baseball game became a musical, the Ironmen pumped out “Jesus Christ Superstar” in the dugout. Every year on his drive south to spring training, Snitker still cranks up that song.
The signals were hardly CIA encryption. Snitker remembered a couple in particular, called out from the third base coach’s box: “’Let her eat!’ was bunt. ‘Let her eat, Hazel!’ was steal. Hazel was one of our bus drivers.”
The catcher didn’t even flash signs to the pitcher. You throw it, I’ll catch it, he’d tell his guy on the mound. “Probably doesn’t reflect too well on my methods but, hey, that was me at the time,” Sweet remembered.
Ah, were it only so simple now.
Granted, the Macon Ironmen approach likely wouldn’t work on the stage Snitker now finds himself. But, at least a fellow charged with seeing this biblical trial of a season to its close can take one thing from the Sweet science.
“He was all about relationships with people, and I learned a lot about that from him,” Snitker said.
“That’s probably why I love (baseball) so much is that we had so much fun doing it,” he said. The message: That love is strong enough to survive anything.
But, really, would it be such a bad idea, given how so little else has worked this season, to throw the Braves out there on Turner Field in old mismatched unis and the caps of their choice?
“I don’t know. I think it would be funny,” Sweet said. “They wear all those trick uniforms anyway.
Or not.
Still, if on some quiet moment at the lightly attended ballpark you happen to hear, “Let her eat, Hazel!” from the dugout, you’ll know the steal is on.
