Coppolella: ‘I want to be a part of something special’

Playing experience: Cut from his high school team. His self-scouting report – "I wasn't real good. Played first base. Pitched a little bit. I couldn't run. Couldn't hit too well. Not a very good fielder. I had some power but I didn't make contact enough. But I always loved the game."

College: Notre Dame, degree in business administration

Work history: Yankees 2000-06 (from intern to scouting assistant). Braves (2006-10 Director of baseball operations; 2011 director of pro scouting; 2012 assistant general manager; 2015 general manager).

Family: Wife Cheryl; children Edric, 7; Reese, 4; Dean 2.

They wandered the endless hallways of the Gaylord Opryland Resort last week in herds. Mere babes they were, with their new haircuts, their Young Republican Collection ensemble, their resumes and the unsullied belief that they could be the next great baseball executive.

How many hundreds of college-age applicants pass each year through baseball’s Winter Meetings seeking office work (the event is one big employment fair)? And how very few of them ever get traction in the major league workplace?

From such hungry ranks rose one John Coppolella. Also known as Coppy to those inside the Braves organization or “The Man Who Traded Anyone I’ve Ever Heard Of” to the fan at large.

He still can see a little of himself in those ambitious souls who trolled at the base of the Braves’ sixth-floor suite here last week. Although Coppolella never could have afforded to travel to such an exotic convention when he was their age — why here he is 15 years later still paying off college debt.

He certainly feels what draws them. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of something as self-affirming as baseball? And who wouldn’t see earning a general manager’s title at 37 the fulfillment of the most fantastic kind of dream (an achievement to be celebrated for a good 30 seconds before getting back to working the phone or dissecting some prospect from San Pedro de Macoris).

Upon getting the call in late September that he was going to be named GM, a year after having already been a central figure to an ongoing, dramatic makeover of the Braves, Coppolella said: “I thought about being a kid, going to all the games. I thought about following it my whole life. Thought about having turned everything in my life toward this. Thought about my family living paycheck to paycheck. Thought about not eating when I couldn’t afford to when living in Tampa.”

And then, in an instant his brain shifted to overdrive: “I thought this is really great … now don’t mess it up. Find a way to work harder — and I don’t know if that’s possible.”

He definitely isn’t timid — his first move upon getting the GM title was to trade the highly popular shortstop Andrelton Simmons. Think of how different things may have been had that girl he asked to the prom 20 years ago actually said yes.

As a teenager, Coppolella was a husky lad, by his own admission a lumbering, no-tool first-baseman who was cut from his high school team. Further disappointment awaited. Having determined to ask a special friend to the prom, Coppolella went into training. He lived on broiled chicken and water, worked out determinedly and lost close to 140 pounds in six months, he said.

And, then after all that, when he asked her to the big dance, the girl was taken.

Two lessons he said he took from that episode.

“When I put my mind to something (like losing 140 pounds), I can do it.”

And, “I didn’t get around to asking her in time. It’s like a big trade. You got to move, or you might not get it.”

Chasing a dream

The son of Gino and Nan Coppolella was conceived in Italy and raised in SoCal. His father was from the east of Italy, Foggia, and met Nan when she was teaching the children of U.S. diplomats abroad. They married there and came over in early 1978.

Coppolella came by his affection for baseball through osmosis, following the same team, the Angels, that employed his father to park cars. That was a second job for Gino, a postal worker full-time while his wife continued to teach.

Having worked himself so he could range from home and get one of those pricey Notre Dame degrees — this one in business administration — Coppolella had one foot on the corporate escalator.

The American Dream was right there in his palm. Intel, he said, was ready to hire him for a cool $90,000 a year to start, along with a $10K signing bonus.

But the American Pastime Dream was overpowering. The numbers he wished to crunch were attached to grown men in little boys’ uniforms. He had written every team in professional baseball, major and minor league, seeking any type of work. It was the mighty New York Yankees who informed him he was a finalist for an internship.

So, as he and his parents made a spring 2000 trip from South Bend, Ind. to New York, he followed up on that lead by conducting a sort of movable interview, stopping three times at pay phones — remember pay phones? — along the way to check with the Yankees about his status.

His parents’ disapproval when he accepted an $18,000-a-year internship with no promise of future employment was nearly palpable enough to fog the car windows.

Enter the struggling-artist period. Stationed at the Yankees’ Tampa headquarters, young Coppolella worked a second, restaurant job briefly to survive. He skipped meals sometimes while awaiting the rescue of his next paycheck.

Still, he was like a piece of office furniture at the Yankees complex, always there. Initially, when he didn’t have a key at the place, he’d bang on the door before sunup until security let him in.

Coppolella earned regular work with the Yankees, and when assigned to assist director of player personnel Damon Oppenheimer (currently VP and director of amateur scouting for the team), the young man with a head full of numbers received some particularly sage advice.

“I told him you got to be well-rounded in the game,” Oppenheimer recalled last week. “I told him you’re always going to have the way about you that people are going to think you’re a numbers guy because you didn’t play, you don’t have the appearance of a player. But you still can become a good evaluator. That’s one of the keys, to be able to handle both evaluating and the analytics side of it.”

Striking that balance between statistics and instinct always is a tricky thing for any roster builder. And when you lack the “street cred” of a former player, proving yourself around a table of hardened baseball folk is a sizable challenge. Coppolella began earning his place at the table through a lot of hot, steamy nights scouting the Florida State League.

Hired for his energy and passion

In 2006, the Braves sought help in their baseball-operations department, looking for someone to get them up to speed on all the latest wonders of Sabermetrics. Current team president John Schuerholz remembers interviewing three men for the job. He hired Coppolella for “the look in his eye and where he was in his seat, sitting at the front of the seat, his energy and desire and passion for the game,” he said.

Drawing distinctions between modern baseball general managers is increasingly difficult. It seems this new breed all possess fancy Ivy League credentials and a fetish for statistical analysis. Coppolella is one of 11 major league GMs under the age of 40.

Coppolella is in the class of the baseball savant, capable of instant recall on a player’s background. So, too, is he cast as a creative thinker, imaginative in dealing with the complexities of contracts and payroll and player movement. “His brain is so electric, so forward thinking,” Schuerholz said.

“We had this little joke that after a while I’d tell him, ‘Listen, think outside the box, but once in a while try to keep one foot in it,” Oppenheimer said.

It hasn’t been until recently that Coppolella has been doing his work in the public eye. Part of his introduction has been to get knocked around like milk bottles at the carnival midway, the fate of the guy spearheading the most drastic reworking of a roster ever witnessed in these parts. One by one, he and president of baseball operations John Hart rid the Braves of their most popular players — Jayson Heyward, Craig Kimbrel, Simmons, and, this week, Shelby Miller — and replaced them with prospects and promises. Meanwhile, last season’s Braves had their highest loss total (95 games) in a quarter century.

He is still learning how to be a lightning rod. Each evening at last week’s Winter Meetings, the Braves held a media briefing up in their suite. Hart took the lead, both explaining that day’s movement and subtly showing his understudy the finer points of selling the plan. At the other end of the couch sat Coppolella, legs crossed, one foot nervously bouncing, always on the phone, thumbs playing the text function like Billy Joel playing the piano.

There is an intensity to the new Braves GM that almost unsettles. Said the husband and father of three: “That’s what I think about the first thing in the morning — it should be my wife and kids — but it’s how do we make the Braves better?”

There is a confidence that belies his lack of experience holding the big title.Along with a complete certainty that he made the right call years ago, back when he was one of those same young, ambitious baseball acolytes that he passed every day in the hallways in Nashville.

“I could have had a good life if I had gone to work for Intel,” he said. “But I don’t want a good life. I want a great life. I want to be a part of something special.

“When we win another World Series here, I want to be a big part of that. I want to be right in the middle of that.”