It’s two days before the start of a new season, the start of “a new day for Braves’ baseball,” as Terry McGuirk put it, and the organization’s chairman is grudgingly being asked to retrace recent history.
“I’ve had a lot of highs and a lot of lows in 43 years (with the Braves), and I take responsibility for all of it,” McGuirk said Tuesday. “No question the Coppy time four months, five months ago was one of the lowest. We were shocked.”
“Coppy time.” That’s how McGuirk jumped into the ugliness of this offseason and the forced exit of former general manager John Coppolella.
McGuirk said Coppolella’s exit was akin to cutting out “cancer.”
The suggestion being, the rest of the Braves’ organization was free of disease.
It’s time to move forward. I get that. The Braves open the season Thursday against Philadelphia at SunTrust Park. Expectations this season are modest, but there’s interest surrounding the young pitchers, excitement about the impending arrival of (first-ballot Hall of Famer) Ronald Acuna, intrigue about what moves new general manager Alex Anthopoulos will make.
As a general rule, today and the future is where the focus should be. But five months ago, Coppolella and special assistant Gordon Blakeley, the Butch and Sundance of the Dominican Republic baseball signing underworld, were forced to resign.
McGuirk declined to speak a word about it until Tuesday. He declined interviews through October and into November, citing MLB’s investigation. When the investigation ended in November and Coppolella was banned for life and president of baseball operations John Hart was allowed to quietly tip-toe out the backdoor without public condemnation, McGuirk continued his no-speak stance (beyond a brief printed statement).
Fast forward to spring training. McGuirk and I chatted about his decision not to chat. He initially declined an on-the-record interview. I suggested the possibility of him doing a sort of state-of-the-Braves interview before the season. That morphed into Tuesday, when I sat in a team board room with Tim Tucker and David O’Brien of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and McGuirk, Anthopoulos and executives Derek Schiller (president and CEO of Braves) and Mike Plant (president and CEO of Braves Development).
Yes, everybody wants to move on. But it’s difficult to move on without understanding what went wrong in the past and why anybody should be confident that this dark chapter of franchise history won’t be repeated.
McGuirk attempted to do that. He said he knew nothing about Coppolella’s actions, which took place over a span of more than three years. That seems dubious. But that’s his story and he’s sticking to it, and neither Coppolella, nor Blakeley, nor Hart -- who stunningly was allowed to step back into his MLB Network job despite his soiled immediate past -- are saying anything publicly to counter that.
McGuirk maintains Coppolella went rogue, that he did this all on his own. Whether you believe him or not, it’s the easiest way to protect the team brand and build trust with fans.
He said he knew nothing of rules violations until MLB contacted him.
“We measured that against the high-integrity operation we had run, (and) it got compromised by this guy,” McGuirk said, alluding to Coppolella. “We turned over anything and everything that MLB wanted. Just to use a bad analogy, it was a cancer that we discovered and cut out as quickly as we could do. We have a long body of work in this franchise that we feel like we’ve done right. That shocked me. I didn’t believe that could happen in our organization, and it did.”
It was and still is McGuirk’s responsibility to oversee budgets. So how is it possible that he did not know millions of dollars were being illegally spent in the international market without his knowledge or suspicion? And if really he didn’t know, is that even a greater indictment as to how detached he was as a top executive?
“He was misusing budgets that he had, and he spent it in the wrong direction,” he said. “All I can tell you is, it was something nobody had any knowledge of. He kept it in a very tight cocoon of things that he was doing with people who were working for him. The day we found out was his last day.”
Coppolella declined comment when reached via text message.
In the old organizational structure, McGuirk said, Coppolella reported to Hart, who reported to John Schuerholz, who reported to him.
“I was too far away,” he said.
In the new organizational structure, Anthopoulos and four other senior executives report directly to him. “I’m tethered more closely” to player personnel, he said.
There were indications in October and November that McGuirk was attempting to protect Hart and keep him in the organization. When I asked about that, he said, “I’m not going to validate any assumption about whose job I was trying to save or not. John Hart and I had a conversation, and he left the company.”
It’s not certain what the end of “Coppy time” means for the organization moving forward. If Anthopoulos makes enough right moves, if there are more hits than misses in player development and Liberty Media eventually invests in player payroll, success is inevitable.
But winning is needed to regain the trust of the fan base. The team’s brand has been damaged -- by this offseason, by perceptions that the Braves have become an organization that cares more about lucrative real estate transactions than winning and by four consecutive losing seasons.
“I don’t agree with you,” McGuirk said, when asked about the brand damage. “Avid fans understand we had this issue, but it’s quickly in the rearview mirror.”
McGuirk, Schiller and Plant all maintain that the Braves’ commercial real estate business, punctuated by the development of The Battery Atlanta, all is about giving Anthopoulos money to spend on players.
“We’ve cleared the deck for next year,” McGuirk said. “There will be very few teams that have as much to spend in the marketplace next winter as the Atlanta Braves. The opportunity to spend is there. But it will be done judiciously and sequentially when Alex says it’s time.”
McGuirk and other team executives are right about one thing: Winning cures all. It’s the Braves’ best hope of having this offseason become a faded memory.
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