All is well for Brian Snitker’s first spring training as a retiree

He just won’t be in charge anymore, having ceded his post to Walt Weiss. Snitker will be an adviser to the organization, which more or less means he gets to come and go as he pleases.

“It’s just going to be fun to bop around and not have duties,” Snitker said of his role. “And if I want to go over and catch a minor league game, I can.”

You could ask for nothing better for Snitker, who turned 70 in October. After decades of service to the Braves, including the final nine-plus as manager, he possessed the means to retire and the health to enjoy this next chapter of his life with his wife, Ronnie.

“Mentally, I’m not ready to be put away yet or anything like that,” Snitker said. “I feel pretty sharp and have a lot of energy. I feel good. Which is good. I’m glad I feel good if I’m retiring. I’ve seen a lot of people that, they work until they can’t do anything.”

One of those people was his father, Richard, who was a salesperson for Jim Beam in Illinois.

“I look back, and he had a stressful job but never really got to enjoy retirement,” Snitker said. “So I kind of hope, God willing, that I can do that.”

It would be a deserved reward for the one they call “Snit,” universally beloved within the Braves organization.

Loyal service marked his near-half-century of employment with the Braves. Most of it was spent in the dusty minor leagues, developing players for the majors and providing for his family with modest salaries.

As Snitker recalled at his retirement news conference:

“I look back on those days when Ronnie and I, we’d go into a town (for a new managerial assignment), and she’d go to the consignment store and buy bunk beds for the kids, and we’d sleep on a mattress at the base of it,” Snitker said. “Balancing your checkbook to go to Kroger. And you know what? It was the greatest time ever because you work with the kids and the players, and Hank (Aaron) allowed you to do that, and (I) said, ‘Don’t worry about it — I’m going to give you a better product back when the year’s over.’ It was fun.”

As the legend goes, Snitker was summoned from managing Triple-A Gwinnett in May 2016 to be the Braves’ interim manager. He earned the full-time job, leading the team to the 2021 World Series title. The Braves won six consecutive NL East titles under his watch before he called it a career at the end of the 2025 season.

It was a feel-good story — the loyal company man who made it to the top. At Snitker’s retirement news conference, team chairman Terry McGuirk appropriately described him as “one of the finest people to ever wear the Braves uniform.”

As his presence in North Port attests, he won’t separate himself completely from the team. When the season begins, he looks forward to checking out prospects across the Braves’ minor league system, players who have mostly been just names on scouting reports to him.

“Everybody’s asking me like, ‘How’s retirement?’” Snitker said. “I say, ‘Well, I really don’t know yet.’ I probably won’t know until April, really. It’s been the same.”

In retirement, he anticipates traveling with Ronnie and attending the baseball games of his three grandsons, 10-year-old twins Jude and Luke Goodman and their five-year-old brother, Hank. (Luke and Jude count the grandson of Braves legend Dale Murphy among their teammates.)

They call him Grandpa.

“I see myself as a taxi running around for them,” he said.

It is an opportunity to lavish upon them the attention that his career prevented him from giving to his two children.

“I’m the grandparent, so I kind of sit there and eat my peanuts in my chair and enjoy it, let the moms and dads stress out about everything,” he said.

He has his health, wits and three boys who adore their grandfather. A ride into the sunset awaits.

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