Anthopoulos sends message with coaching change. Are Braves listening?

So, the urgency was such that Anthopoulos made a move he’d never done before because it went against his philosophy for running a club, and yet he would have been willing to go ahead with the status quo if the right candidate hadn’t been available.

It’s possible it’s just a highly unlikely set of circumstances — a coach being ineffective and the ideal replacement happening to be available.

But the juxtaposition suggests this is less about Tuiasosopo waving too many base runners home and more about sending a message to a team that has underperformed through a little more than a third of the season.

Certainly, Tuiasosopo has made some egregious mistakes on his decisions to send or not send runners home.

But his overly aggressive decisions aren’t why the Braves were 27-31 as of Tuesday afternoon, 10 games out of first place in the National League East.

“Yea, it is interesting for sure” an MLB scout wrote in a text to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “ATL has many more problems than their 3rd base coach. Questionable (bullpen). Holes in the lineup. No depth in minors. Who is sending msg to? Fanbase? Snit?”

Good questions. The main problem is not what is happening at third base, but that not enough players are getting there.

A lineup with four players who have won Silver Slugger awards (Ozzie Albies, Matt Olson, Marcell Ozuna and Austin Riley) and a fifth who joined the team May 23 (Ronald Acuña Jr.) doesn’t get on base enough (14th in MLB in on-base percentage at .319 as of Tuesday afternoon) and comes up short when runners are in scoring position (19th in batting average with RISP at .246).

FanGraphs has a “clutch” statistic, defined as how much better or worse a team or player performs in a high-leverage situation compared with a neutral one.

The Braves ranked 22nd in that category before Tuesday’s games. They were 28th last year, leading to the dismissal of longtime hitting coach Kevin Seitzer. They ranked sixth in the record-setting 2023 season that is an increasingly distant memory.

Changing the third base coach isn’t going to fix that, at least directly.

Almost certainly, firing Snitker midseason never was going to be an option given his undeniable record of success and decades of loyalty to the organization. And firing hitting coach Tim Hyers was (or is) not a likelihood, given he was hired less than a year ago and brought a solid resume to the Braves.

And since the pitching isn’t the culprit, that apparently made Tuiasosopo the guy who had to fall on the sword and send a message to the team, the coaching staff and perhaps the fan base that the performance to this point has not been acceptable.

It’s unfortunate for the one they call Tui, who has been with the Braves organization since 2019, working his way up from managing the Single-A Rome Braves to the Triple-A Gwinnett Stripers before his promotion to become the Braves third base coach after the 2023 season. However, his contributions to the team’s inconsistency made him vulnerable.

For Braves fans who lament the team’s management doesn’t care about the on-field product, this is at least evidence that Anthopoulos is trying to find a way to give his team the help and spark it clearly needs.

With 104 games remaining before the team’s Tuesday night home game against the Diamondbacks, the clock is running on the Braves’ bid to make their eighth consecutive postseason appearance.

Just to make the playoffs, the Braves likely need to get into the 90-win range, which would require them to finish 63-41. That’s a 98-win pace over 162 games. Each passing series the Braves lose — they’ve lost their past four — reduces their margin for error.

Only time will tell if Gonzalez can make a difference. You may remember he served as the Braves manager from 2011-16, the successor to Hall of Famer Bobby Cox. He was fired in May 2016 after an MLB-worst 9-28 start, opening the door for Snitker to take over as the interim and ultimately earn the full-time managerial job.

Memorably, Gonzalez learned about his termination during a road series at Pittsburgh, not from then-GM John Coppolella but when he received an email from Delta Air Lines informing him of his impending flight home.

One would hope this message is received, if less awkwardly, no less clearly.