What made the Braves play like champions again?

By the time his team lost the first two games of a series against the Arizona Diamondbacks to close out May, the Braves had fallen four games below .500 and Snitker decided something had to be done.

“I was tossing and turning, not sleeping,” he recalled. “Then I started taking some notes in my hotel room and I needed to get in front of them. We weren’t ourselves.

“I was getting text messages, ‘Are you going to blow up at these guys?’ No. Players don’t respond to that.”

So Snitker consulted with his bench coach, Walt Weiss, and decided they had to act now, calling a closed-door meeting in the visitors’ clubhouse as his players entered Phoenix’s Chase Field facing a possible sweep.

“Snit’s not going to stand in front of a clubhouse and rant and rave,” Weiss said. “It was a very simple message.”

The message: relax. The consequences: 14 straight wins.

By the time the Braves finally lost for the first time this month on Friday, they had cut the Mets’ lead in the National League East Division from 10½ games to 5½. They had gone from 4½ games out of a wild-card spot to owning the fourth-best record in the NL.

“One event doesn’t make 14 wins happen,” new Braves first baseman Matt Olson said. “But it was nice to hear Snit go up there and tell everyone to relax a little bit. We weren’t playing great baseball as far as the whole package, so it was just a ‘take a deep breath’ kind of meeting.”

Some of this seemed quite familiar: the Braves got off to a similar slow start a season ago and eventually won a championship, becoming the first team to reach the World Series after not having a winning record until Aug. 6, according to Elias Sports Bureau.

In fact, Snitker acknowledges that winning that 2021 title might have had something to do with the slow start. A season that stretched into November, followed by a winter of appearances and ad campaigns and more time commitments that come along with being champions, not to mention a work stoppage that lasted until March, could have weighed on the players. Baseball hasn’t crowned back-to-back champions in more than two decades, and the Braves’ slow start only amplified talk of a World Series hangover.

“It takes you about a month to feel normal. It takes you a long time,” Snitker said. “I don’t know if hangover is the right word. The effort was there, but there’s an effect of a long, deep playoff run.”

Third baseman Austin Riley added, “I don’t know about hangovers. We were putting a lot of pressure on ourselves to do too much. Things that were a little out of us.”

The Braves’ resurgence has come on both sides of the ball. As of June 1, Atlanta’s team OPS of .870 ranks third in the majors and only the Yankees have more home runs than the Braves’ 39. Meanwhile, the pitching staff’s 3.61 ERA is seventh in baseball during that stretch. Getting that kind of contribution will be even more crucial as the schedule increases in intensity with series against the San Francisco Giants and Los Angeles Dodgers this week.

In the offseason, Snitker studied the physical toll and mental pressure that trying to repeat on a team can take. He took notes from a team that did win back-to-back titles: the 1992-93 Toronto Blue Jays.

“I think they had 14 new guys the second year,” Snitker said. “I remember the 14-year run we had [in the 1990s]. I think there were 10 new guys every year.

“You’re not going to carbon copy this.”

From the start of the winter, it was clear to the Braves that they wouldn’t try: a combination of offseason moves finally had the team saying goodbye to Freddie Freeman and hello to Olson.

Snitker’s locker room call came on June 1, after the Braves lost their second game of the series to the Diamondbacks in extra innings the night before. From there, it was a complete turnaround. First, the team won the series finale against the Diamondbacks. Then came sweeps to the Rockies, Athletics, Pirates and Nationals. Sixteen days later, Atlanta finally lost, dropping two of three to the Cubs over the weekend.

“We’ve hit a rhythm,” outfielder Adam Duvall said. “Everybody’s doing their job. Everybody’s contributing … Sometimes it’s good to get together and make sure everybody is working in the same direction.”

“There are only certain things you can control,” said rookie Spencer Strider. “When you call attention to things, you make them a priority. There was no panic and no great urgency to change the way we were working.”