5 John Schneider decisions that doomed Blue Jays in the Wild Card Series

The Invisible Babe

On August 4, the Blue Jays were wobbling. On the heels of losing three out of four at home to the Orioles, they traveled to Fenway Park to play the Red Sox, who sat only two games behind the Jays in the playoff race and had already beaten them seven consecutive times to start the season.

That morning, a former 28th-round pick named Davis Schneider was called up to the Jays from Triple-A Buffalo. Of course, we all know what happened next. Schneider went off against the Sox, famously hitting a home run in his first career at bat, and leading the Jays to a three-game sweep, earning him the nickname, “Babe.”

A few days later, Schneider unexpectedly disappeared from the lineup, making only one start from August 13-25. Incidentally, in this start, Schneider hit the game winning home run.

When he finally returned on August 26, with the Jays in the midst of a 5-8 stretch and having fallen out of a playoff spot, Schneider went 3/3 with a home run in an 8-3 Jays win. The next day, well, you probably already see where this is going, he hit another homer, and then another two days after that, as the Jays launched into a 10-4 stretch.

Like any young player, Schneider eventually ran into some struggles, enduring an 0-31 slump down the stretch before hitting two ringing doubles in the final game of the season. Still though, as the offense floundered its way to one measly run across 18 innings of two playoff games, it was impossible not to wonder why John Schneider did not give the Babe a chance to save the season once again.

Could he not have pinch hit instead of Merrifield or Espinal? Could he not have replaced a hopelessly overmatched Daulton Varsho in the final at bat of the season representing the tying run? Instead, Davis Schneider remained glued to the bench to the very last out, unable to earn so much as one opportunity to recapture the magic one more time.

That’s the thing about managing by analytics though.

Just about everyone reading this knows certain people – at work, on their beer league teams, in life – who have the innate ability to show up when the chips are down, to perform at their best in the most important moments. It’s not a complicated or controversial statement. And yet, the doctrine of analytics denies that these people even exist.

Is Davis Schneider such a person? Surely it is too early in his career to know for sure. But thanks to John Schneider and his unwavering servility to analytics-based lineup construction, we did not even get the opportunity to find out.

Brandon Belt batting second

Speaking of players showing up when it matters …

I know what some of you are thinking – Why wouldn’t Brandon Belt hit second? Look at the stats, he was one of the Jays’ best hitters this year. Surely, of all the mistakes John Schneider made, this was not one of them.

I am going to put this as delicately as I can: 2023 Brandon Belt was one of the most shameless stat-padders in the history of the Toronto Blue Jays.

Yes, he put up a very impressive .858 OPS this season. And yet, here are some statistics which are not included in OPS:

Belt hit .208/.315/.705 with runners in scoring position this year; with runners in scoring position and two outs, he was even worse, slashing .194/.310/.643. In high leverage situations, defined by the potential impact which success or failure in a situation will have on the outcome of the game, Belt slashed .209/.333/.721 with three home runs and 15 RBI. In fact, over the entire season, batting almost exclusively in a run producing position, Belt had only seven RBIs in the seventh inning or later when the score was within two runs either way.

In other words, not only was Brandon Belt not one of the best hitters on the team, but any time it actually mattered, he was one of the worst. Unsurprisingly, Belt went 0-8 with five strikeouts in the two playoff games.

For John Schneider to pencil Belt’s name into the two-spot not once but twice in the most important games of the season – despite a full season’s worth of evidence that he is essentially Bradley Zimmer in moments that matter – was little more than a sacrifice at the altar of subjective statistics which don’t actually measure the things which help a team win games.

Biggio’s breaking balls

In his first at bat of Game 1, Cavan Biggio saw eight pitches, every single one of them a breaking ball, before he finally struck out looking on a hanging sweeper and walked back to the dugout with a confused look on his face.

Why is this significant? Well, it has been known around the league for years that Biggio struggles with elevated fastballs, particularly those with high velocity. As such, nearly two-thirds of the pitches he has seen over his career have been fastballs. Moreover, both Twins starters in the series, as well as a number of their relievers, throw significantly more fastballs than any other pitch against lefthanded hitters. Surely, as a hitter who is fed mostly fastballs facing pitchers who throw mostly fastballs, Biggio was sitting on a fastball.

Throughout the season, an oft-repeated criticism was that Blue Jays hitters were being overloaded with information before heading to the plate, the team’s hitting coaches, rather than working with batters through the ebbs and flows of games and series’, instead serving as little more than delivery boys for stat sheets from the analytics department.

The problem is, if the Jays have statistics which they think tell them what the other team is going to do, then the other team has these as well. Numerous times this season, it seemed as though by simply doing the opposite of what the stats said they were going to do, opponents were able to leave Jays hitters totally befuddled.

Indeed, with all signs pointing to Biggio seeing a steady diet of fastballs, he instead saw nearly 80% breaking balls in the Wild Card series. How befuddled did this leave him? Well, in eight at bats, he watched nine breaking balls, many of them hangers, float past him for a called strike, and swung and missed at three more, nearly every time, with the same perplexed look on his face.

Was there ever a moment when John Schneider, or Guillermo Martinez, or Dave Hudgens approached Biggio and said, ‘forget the fastball, go up there and sit on a sweeper.’ Judging by the results, it appears not.

They couldn’t. The statistics were set in advance, immovable as the game changed around them.

Romano enters in the seventh inning of Game 2

On the surface, this is perhaps not a managerial mistake by John Schneider. Really, the purpose of the move was straightforward, almost admirable – if you’re going to get eliminated from the playoffs, you don’t want to do so having never used your best reliever. Call it the Buck Showalter clause.

And yet, what if the Jays had come back to take the lead in the eighth or ninth inning, only to find themselves without their All Star closer to lock things down in the ninth? While the merits of saving bullets in an elimination game can be debated at length, what I am more focused on is the message Schneider was sending his team – in effect, that he didn’t believe they could come back from a two-run deficit and take the lead before the ninth.

This was not the only time this type of attitude emerged in the series.

As Kevin Gausman prepared for Game 1, all Schneider could talk about was how much he had struggled against the Twins, and their prolific ability to lay off his splitter. When Gausman finally took to the mound, he did indeed struggle, but not because they were laying off his splitter, rather because he couldn’t throw his splitter anywhere near the strike zone. He looked almost like a guy who was overthrowing his best pitch, trying to be too perfect, because he had the idea built in his head that they weren’t going to chase.

Look at the other side of the field. As star slugger Royce Lewis returned from a hamstring injury, Twins manager Rocco Baldelli did not talk about him struggling with his timing after missing three weeks. Instead, he loudly proclaimed that Lewis was ready to go, ready to hit third, and ready to mash. Lo and behold, Lewis hit two home runs in Game 1, almost single handedly winning the contest for the Twins.

The difference in managerial styles could not be more glaring, in the Wild Card, or, for John Schneider, really for the entire season.

Consider, for one, all the times Schneider spoke to the media about Vlad Guerrero Jr’s struggles at the plate, about how he was pressing, trying to do too much, about how desperately he needed to go on a run like he had in the past. Rarely, if ever, did Schneider mention that Vladdy was hitting .349/.397/.984 with runners in scoring position and two outs, or .304/.379/.843 in high leverage situations; never did he raise his voice to proclaim that Vladdy was carrying an anemic offense despite his struggles – and despite his mother being seriously ill – through clutch hitting and sheer force of will.

In short, this attitude of expected underperformance, of unending struggles, of always being at the disadvantage, is something which absolutely cannot be part of the team next year.

Fire John Schneider?

With a flameout as downright embarrassing as the Jays just experienced, the first thought of many is going to be to call for the manager’s head. Should John Schneider be fired? Well, one thing is for sure – it will be hard for Schneider to ever come back from the fourth inning of Game 2, to ever regain the trust of his players, to ever convince them that he is anything more than the impotent mouthpiece of a group of stuffed shirts skulking around in the shadows.

But that’s just it. If you’re going to point the finger at John Schneider, well, you better have more than one finger. His worst decisions and most egregious mistakes don’t just fall out of the sky. They are meticulously laid out and mandated by Ross Atkins and his precious analytics department.

So, should John Schneider get the sack? Possibly … but this should be the decision of a new general manager as they work through the process of building a new analytics department and a new way for the organization to view and utilize statistics.

Simply, regardless of the manager behind the bench, the Jays cannot afford to run it back for another year with Ross Atkins and his flawed analytics steering the ship.

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