JUST GETTING STARTED
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he phone is ringing and the name “Alex Anthopoulos” appears on the display. I’m not expecting the call, and sensing that he may have caught me off-guard, the Atlanta Braves general manager and president of baseball operations offers an explanation: He forgot to mention something during our lengthy chat yesterday.
Anthopoulos keeps a running note on his iPhone where he saves quotes he comes across — inspirational messages, deep thoughts and basically anything that resonates with him. When we sat down together — on what was a busy late-March day at the Braves’ spring training home in North Port, Fla. — he went through a bunch of recent additions. But when he woke up this morning, Anthopoulos realized he missed something important.
It’s a series of quotes he culled from a November article by Sportsnet’s Luke Fox in which Toronto Maple Leafs president Brendan Shanahan discusses his playing days under Hall of Fame coach Scotty Bowman:
“Scotty hated comfort. He hated for his team and his players to ever feel complacent and comfortable. So, he created adversity always.”
“Then once the playoffs started, he took away adversity. You were hardened by then. Scotty created adversity, but it wasn’t cruel.”
“To me, it’s always about development. It’s about [players]dealing with the adversity.”
“If it didn’t exist in November, December, January, [Bowman] found a way to create adversity, so you’d be hardened by the time the playoffs came. When things get noisy and the pressure mounts, we work internally to solve problems and solve issues.”
Anthopoulos read the story in December and immediately sent it to Braves manager Brian Snitker and his coaching staff. To the GM, it perfectly encapsulated the organization’s 2021 campaign. The Braves were hit with major injuries to several key players and sported a 44-45 record at the all-star break. Anthopoulos orchestrated a bevy of trades leading up to the July deadline that essentially remade his outfield and injected new life into his club, which then went on a run to clinch the National League East. Once in the playoffs, the team pushed its way to a World Series title without even facing an elimination game. Anthopoulos attributes that dominant second-half effort to his players being hardened during the season, just like Shanahan said.
When the Braves clinched on Nov. 2, 2021, Anthopoulos became the first Canadian GM to win the World Series. The off-season that followed has been a busy one — after testing positive for COVID-19, there was a parade, a whirlwind of transactions and an unprecedented public display of emotion — but that flurry of activity has also included an abundance of learning experiences. If you spend any time with the 44-year-old Anthopoulos, or talk to people who know him, you begin to understand he lives to connect the dots, to dig deeper, to look back on his successes and failures with a critical eye. Anthopoulos has a lost-in-the-desert-for-days-level thirst for knowledge. And as he seeks to maintain his newly claimed spot atop the baseball universe, it’s poised to serve him well.
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ight before Anthopoulos reached the current peak of his career, he encountered one last daunting challenge — its timing providing the type of drama typically reserved for the movies. The Braves opened the World Series on the road, playing the first two games in Houston, before moving to Atlanta for Game 3. Anthopoulos attended that Friday night contest. Hosting some guests from Canada who needed negative COVID-19 results to fly home, he arranged for them to be tested at Truist Park the next morning. He wasn’t required to take a test by MLB rules because he was fully vaccinated, but since he was there anyway he figured he might as well. While his guests were all clear, Anthopoulos was positive. Even before the initial shock faded, his mind was racing. He had been in the Braves clubhouse the night before, high-fiving players, some of whom were unvaccinated. “I was so consumed with someone testing positive,” Anthopoulos recalls. “Because if, all of a sudden, players test positive and they’re removed from the World Series, I put the blame on myself.”
In the end, no players were impacted. Still, Anthopoulos didn’t want to be a distraction, so he disappeared, only informing the team’s manager and owner of his test result, along with MLB. He watched the rest of the Series with his family at home in Georgia, where the stress continued to eat at him. Anthopoulos wasn’t so much bothered by being physically removed from his team during the biggest games of his career. He just wanted to win. At the beginning of Game 6, he was so nervous that he decided to go for a drive instead of watching it on TV. His wife, Cristina, managed to convince him to change his mind and stay. The Braves blew out the Astros, 7-0, that night and only once the on-field celebration and ensuing ceremony were complete, word got out that the executive was missing due to COVID protocol.
Though the championship parade through the streets of Atlanta took place just three days later, Anthopoulos did get to participate in that celebration. He and his family had their own vehicle, separate from the rest of the team, and Anthopoulos addressed Braves fans from a suite during the Truist Park celebration. “Just the love you feel [from fans]is like the greatest baseball moment of my life,” he says.
Adding to that joy was that Cristina and the couple’s kids, Julia, 11, and John, 9, got to be part of it. The family has now planted roots in Georgia, but only after several years of transition in which they moved from Toronto, where Anthopoulos worked as Blue Jays GM, to Los Angeles, where he was vice-president of baseball operations with the Dodgers, before landing in Atlanta in 2017. When they left L.A., Julia was sobbing; now, here she was a part of a championship parade driving past some of her friends from school, allowing them all to connect and bask in the celebration together. In that sense, the parade was like a prize for the Anthopoulos family. At one point, John, who loves to joke around and doesn’t shy away from centre stage, started wildly waving to the crowd, encouraging people to make more noise.
“You sacrifice so much and move them,” says Anthopoulos. “From Toronto to Los Angeles to Atlanta, they’ve been on a crazy journey. We did it as a family and they did it for me. And so, it’s nice when they can experience what makes these jobs special. Seeing a parade and seeing schools shut down and [hundreds of thousands of people in attendance]helps them understand the magnitude of professional sports and community pride and what it meant for the Braves — a second championship in the history of the city.”
Julia and John weren’t the only ones given a new view of their father’s day job. Anthopoulos himself found a deeper appreciation for the ways his work impacts the community. He’d gotten a first sense of it in Toronto when, during the 2015 playoff run, he would walk his children to school and spot more and more people donning Blue Jays gear each day. Or when the manager of an Italian restaurant a few blocks from his home told him that they had to install TVs in the establishment because nobody wanted to come in and dine during the hours of Blue Jays games. During the 2021 World Series, people who lived on Anthopoulos’s street decorated their houses to celebrate the Braves. The front of each home featured balloons, signs and flags, almost like it was Baseball Halloween. One day, when Anthopoulos and his family were out, their neighbours decorated their house with notes and signs.
Similarly, a few weeks after the championship, Anthopoulos and his family visited one of their favourite restaurants, Marcel, an Atlanta steakhouse. The staff knew they were coming and passed Anthopoulos a paper menu that included thoughtful, handwritten messages from each person who worked there, thanking him for bringing a trophy to their city. Touched by the gesture, Anthopoulos brought the menu home that night and eventually framed it.
“Those are the things that are so rewarding,” he says. “It’s a really special thing when you work in a position in an industry that impacts moods and lives and pride. The Braves win the World Series and people in Atlanta walk a little taller.”
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he congratulatory emails and texts that flooded Anthopoulos’s inbox and phone after the win numbered in the hundreds. Messages from the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame and Rush bassist Geddy Lee spring to his mind, but perhaps none were more meaningful than the note from Pat Gillick, architect and GM of the Blue Jays’ 1992 and 1993 World Series teams.
Anthopoulos grew up in Montreal admiring front office personnel. It’s not that he didn’t love players, but as his baseball fandom grew, so did his interest in the decisionmakers behind the scenes. He kept an eye out for executives when he was a young man going to Expos games at Olympic Stadium in the mid-1990s. One day, the Florida Marlins were in town and Anthopoulos knew their GM, Dave Dombrowski, liked to sit in the scouts’ section, so he thought hard about how to strike up a conversation, eventually asking the exec about the status of injured second baseman Quilvio Veras. Dombrowski politely answered the question, but the conversation didn’t go anywhere beyond that.
Anthopoulos got his official start in baseball — a well-known and charming story — as an unpaid intern with the Expos, managing players’ fan mail, before eventually becoming a scouting coordinator. Gillick also came up through the ranks as a scout, and the similarity of their paths is part of the reason Anthopoulos has always idolized him. Anthopoulos ran into Gillick a few times over the years and managed to glean lasting advice from the sage veteran, who told him to “never lose your nerve” and preached the importance of makeup when building out a roster. So naturally, when Anthopoulos saw an unexpected email from Gillick after the World Series that said something along the lines of, “Good going,” he became emotional. “Coming from him, it’s like, ‘Whoa.’ You’re getting Pat Gillick’s approval,” he says. “It’s big, career-wise. I revere him, so it was meaningful.”
Anthopoulos joined the Blue Jays’ scouting department in 2003 and was eventually promoted to assistant GM, then GM in October 2009, taking over after J.P. Ricciardi was fired. Ricciardi had introduced Anthopoulos to his close friend, Billy Beane, and the two soon developed their own bond. “I just immediately gravitated toward his personality,” says Beane, now executive VP of baseball operations for the Oakland Athletics. “If you can’t get along with Alex, there’s something wrong with you.”
Anthopoulos has a reputation in the game for his passionate and humble nature, and according to Beane, his intelligence can end up going overlooked, “masked in all that energy and that sense of humour.” Beane says Anthopoulos has a “mind like a steel trap” and likens him in that regard to New York Yankees GM Brian Cashman. Even when you joke around with them, they tend to pick up things in the conversation that they can utilize later.
Beane, 60, stays in frequent contact with Anthopoulos, whether it’s to share advice or talk baseball matters, and adds that when he eventually leaves baseball, Anthopoulos will be one of the people he remains in touch with for the rest of his life. “When you talk to Alex, it sort of reinvigorates you,” he says. “You do this job a long time and you do take some things for granted. Then, when you talk to Alex, you kind of realize why you wanted the job to begin with. He attacks it with such a youthful exuberance and reminds you, this is a great job.
“Alex reminds you why you wanted the job when you were a kid.”
Beane volunteers that Anthopoulos was on the other end of perhaps the worst transaction of his career — the November 2014 deal that saw the Blue Jays acquire Josh Donaldson from the A’s for Franklin Barreto, Kendall Graveman, Brett Lawrie and Sean Nolin. Donaldson went on to win the American League MVP award, while none of the players sent to Oakland ended up becoming what they were supposed to be.
“In my career the trade that probably didn’t turn out the best for me is the Donaldson [deal],” Beane says. “But Alex is so darn likable that you’re almost happier for him because it turned out that way. He’s a guy you can’t not root for. And I always joke with him about it in a good way. Because, listen, if I’m going to screw up and make a bad trade, I’d just as soon have Alex be on the good side of that.”
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t was another deal with Beane — this one a massive five-player swap in the middle of March — that nearly brought Anthopoulos to tears speaking to media. The Braves had just traded for Matt Olson, whose acquisition ultimately ensured that fellow star first baseman Freddie Freeman, a free agent, would not return to the organization he’d spent the past 15 years with. Anthopoulos had a relationship with Freeman that was admittedly unusual for a GM and player. He likens Freeman to an assistant GM — the two consulted before transactions and, in the off-season, Freeman played an active role in recruitment. The greatest four-year run of Anthopoulos’s career occurred with Freeman riding shotgun. And the two are friends, as well. When Anthopoulos left the team during the World Series, Freeman grew suspicious and FaceTimed him several times. “He’s the only non-family member that I FaceTime with,” says the GM, who ducked the calls and texted Freeman excuses, because he didn’t want to worry his player at such a crucial time.
When Anthopoulos realized the franchise was not going to be able to re-sign Freeman, he pulled the trigger on a deal for Olson. In retrospect, he admits he probably should have let some time pass before holding a press conference — or at least worn shades. Instead, he appeared with his cap pulled down. His voice broke, his head hung low and he bit his lips as he fought back tears. The entire situation weighed heavily on him for weeks, according to some in the organization, and it was the first time in his career he showed such emotion publicly. He acknowledges now he considered it the hardest transaction of his career. “Trust me, I definitely did not want to react that way,” Anthopoulos says. “But I’m not going to apologize for it and I’m not going to be ashamed of it. I care about [Freeman]. You want to be professional and stoic, but that’s just raw emotion that came.”
Anthopoulos’s display of feeling reverberated throughout the Braves clubhouse. “To see a GM hold back tears when he makes a trade for an all-star first baseman — arguably the best first baseman in the league —speaks volumes to the human he is,” says Devon Travis. Travis, in his first full spring training with the club, was hired by Anthopoulos last year to work as a minor-league coach. The two have history, with Anthopoulos trading for Travis in late 2014 and eventually handing him the second base job in Toronto.
Having seen Anthopoulos through the lens of a player and now a coach, Travis says the level of empathy that the executive operates with is rare and appreciated. “There’s walls that you can see as a player,” says Travis. “But yesterday, Alex was sitting in the kitchen [at the Braves facility]having a conversation with 15 guys. … I don’t know if I ever saw [another]GM even say, ‘How you doing?’
“He talks to everybody the same,” continues Travis. “That says a lot about somebody who is the leader of an organization. You could tell a lot based on how they talk to people, and he does it pretty damn well.”
Adds Braves manager Brian Snitker: “Alex is a real person. A genuine person. He’s a wide-open book and you always know where you stand with him.”
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here is a parable about a Chinese farmer — famously told by English writer Alan Watts — that Anthopoulos first came across while watching the ESPN docuseries, Man in the Arena: Tom Brady. In the story, a Chinese farmer loses a horse and is told by neighbours how bad that is. “Maybe,” he responds. The next day, the horse returns alongside seven wild horses. Later, the farmer’s son breaks his leg while trying to tame one of the wild horses. The neighbours come around again and say, “Too bad.” The farmer gives them the same “maybe” and the next day, the son’s injury prevents him from being conscripted to fight in the army. The lesson: When something happens, it usually takes a while before it’s obvious whether it’s good or bad.
In the TV show, Brady, the superstar NFL quarterback, recounts how he relied on it to help gain perspective in the transition from one season to the next. Anthopoulos was so moved while watching the episode that he paused it and went to find his wife and kids. “You guys have to see this,” he told them. “You have to listen to the story and the way Tom Brady tells it.”
Anthopoulos takes obvious pleasure in noting the ways the story relates to his own life. When the Braves lost several players, including star outfielder Ronald Acuña Jr., to injury last season and stumbled to a miserable first half, it looked pretty bad. But Anthopoulos’s actions — trading for multiple players, including outfielders Eddie Rosario and Jorge Soler — indicated that he wasn’t ready to throw in the towel, that “maybe” the team still had a chance to make some noise. Rosario’s bat eventually caught fire in the NL Championship Series, earning him MVP honours, while the same happened for Soler, who was named World Series MVP. If the team didn’t endure a rash of injuries months earlier that spurred it to acquire these players, then maybe they wouldn’t have won the World Series, Anthopoulos reasons. You just don’t know where the chain will lead.
“I was really sad when I left Toronto,” says Anthopoulos. “I was crushed. It was hard. It was a decision I made, a tough decision, but it’s one I felt I wanted to make. It was important to me. And you don’t know how it’s going to turn out. At the time, it felt really hard. But I went to L.A. and I learned all these great things, and I came to Atlanta [and]we won a World Series.”
The parable of the Chinese farmer has helped Anthopoulos process the highs and lows of the past year and a half this off-season, but it’s a quote from Tex Winter, former assistant coach of the Chicago Bulls and L.A. Lakers, that shapes his thinking about the challenges that lie ahead: “You’re only a success for the moment that you complete a successful act.”
At this exact moment in Alex Anthopoulos’s career, that line hits deeply. He pulled off a masterpiece last year, and it could turn out that nothing else he does in baseball can compare to it. Once the first pitch of this 2022 campaign is thrown, the memory of 2021 will fade.
“Tex Winter’s quote is completely true,” Anthopoulos says. “We won three divisions in a row. And the next year it’s over. We scuffled the first half of 2021 and who cares about those three divisions? No one cares. I don’t care. You’re scuffling right now? The divisions are old news. And I kind of feel the same way about the World Series. Flags fly forever and people will talk about it and there will be reunions and people will remember the team that was the last team standing. So, no one can ever take that away.
“But it’s over. And if we don’t have success, no one’s gonna care. So, I do really believe in that. In that moment, 24 to 48 hours [later]or through the parade, you’re a success. And then that’s it. It’s on to the next. We’ll have a ring ceremony, we’ll get through that and then World Series is over. That’s in the past. This season, if we don’t play well, no one’s going to care about the past.
“In my role, I’m expected to deliver every day just like a player.”
And if he can turn in a performance anything close to last year’s, it’s the rest of baseball that will have to start taking notes.
David Goldman/AP; David J. Phillip/AP; Rich von Biberstein/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images; Morry Gash/AP; David J. Griffin/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images.
