20 People to Watch - John Coppolella

Sports fans are passionate. They wear their favorite team’s logo like a coat of arms and think of favorite players like family. They embrace lovable losers and despise good teams that just weren’t good enough. This passion drives every team and every sport, and it’s something John Coppolella, the Braves’ new 37-year-old general manager, can’t let distract him from doing his job.

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“I understand that some of our fans may not like me now because we are making some tough choices,” Coppolella said via email, “but my hope is these decisions will pay off big in the future. I certainly feel for the fans when we trade away a popular player — my own son was upset that we traded away Andrelton Simmons recently — but we have to keep our focus. We can’t let anything distract us from making the right decisions to improve the team’s needs and help us reach our goals.”

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2015 was the worst season the Braves have had since 1990, since before John Schuerholz and Bobby Cox built a team that made the playoffs for 15 straight seasons. 2016 might be worse. How they fare in their last season at Turner Field will in large part be the work of Coppolella, who has overseen an almost complete overhaul of the team’s major league roster. The 2016 team will bear almost no resemblance to the one that last made the playoffs in 2013, whose stars have been dispersed throughout baseball for a mass of promising young prospects. As the team’s assistant general manager since 2012, Coppolella has been one of the chief architects of the team’s rebuilding, a process he has continued to guide since being promoted in October.

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He still works closely with former GM John Hart and legendary Braves general manager John Schuerholz, who is now the team president. “I seek their advice on every major move we make,” Coppolella said, adding that Hart, the team’s new President of Baseball Operations, “always has the final call on all major baseball decisions.”

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Coppolella is doing the legwork, though. He’s the one talking to other general managers and swinging trades like the one the Braves made with the Diamondbacks in December. That deal, where they sent Shelby Miller and a relief prospect for a good young outfielder and two of the top prospects in the game (including Marietta native Dansby Swanson, the No. 1 pick in last June’s draft), was widely hailed by analysts as being lopsided in the Braves’ favor. It’s the latest in a series of trades that have turned the team’s once moribund minor league system into one of the best in baseball.

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Still, the future is far away, and the logic behind the rebuild was questionable to fans and outsiders. The Braves had a core of good, young, homegrown players — Jason Heyward, Craig Kimbrel, Evan Gattis, Simmons, Alex Wood — that most teams would salivate to build around. It’s been hard for fans to watch their favorite players leave town, and to return to the darkness of the hopeless Braves teams of the 1980s. Coppolella is confident, though, that the young players they’ve acquired will form the next great Braves team, even if it’s one that plays in Cobb County instead of in Atlanta.

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“Our goal is always to make the playoffs,” he said. “We believe we will have a better record than we did in 2015, but I have a tough time just aiming for a .500 record as a goal — we need to aim higher. More broadly, we look for continued improvement and the development of our young players. That will be critical as we continue to build for the future.”