Of the many, many times when Brian Snitker could and perhaps should have given up on baseball, the first came in 1980.
By that fall, Snitker, then 24, had hit his ceiling as a player: four years in high school, three in college and now four in the Braves’ minor league system, playing in Southern outposts like Kinston, N.C.; Savannah; and, most recently, Durham, N.C.; where he’d made $750 for the season as a Class A catcher and first baseman.
In that moment, he could have avoided all that followed: the life of 12-hour bus rides, missing entire seasons of a child’s school sports, working on one-year contracts—the nights sleeping on a training table, the decades chasing his big league dream, only to have it snatched away over and over.