Ranking the 5 biggest culprits that deserve the most blame for Blue Jays’ awful start

Manager John Schneider 

When it comes to manager John Schneider, he has been infamously known to make the wrong calls and moves during the course of a game that would end in a Jays’ defeat. Of course, the most notable one in recent memory was the premature pulling of starter José Berríos during Game 2 of the AL Wild Card Series against the Minnesota Twins last year that paved the way for the Twins’ sweep of the Jays.

Now with close to 300 games as manager under his belt with the team, one has to admit that some of the strategies and decision-making by Schneider has been quite daring and perplexing. Unfortunately for the bulk of the time, they tended to backfire on the Jays.

However, for the 2024 season, he has been a lot more conservative on his moves to date as there haven’t been as much dramatic calls that he had made this year that the Jays’ faithful have extensively loathed him for. Moreover, he actually agreed to bring back the Home Run Jacket in the clubhouse recently. In doing so, the move seemed to have given the team somewhat of a spark as they have now gone 8-6 in their past 14 games since its resurrection.

As a result, as much as how recent news have speculated about the potential firing of Schneider due to the Jays’ struggles, he actually has been doing a solid job this season given the circumstances that almost two-thirds of his players have been underperforming. But to say Schneider had totally nothing to do with the Jays’ bad start is false because he has failed in at least one aspect, which was providing the proper motivation and adequate game plan to get the players in the right focus and winning mentality every day.

Blame score: 4