Blue Jays FAQ: Uncomfortable decisions need to be made after early playoff exit

MINNEAPOLIS — During his media availability ahead of Game 2 Wednesday afternoon, John Schneider was mid-answer when the cellphones of everyone in the room started to chime with a test of the National Wireless Emergency Alert system. 

At 1:18 p.m. CT, 2½ hours before first pitch, it provided a moment of levity, and again moments later when a questioner was interrupted when the alarms were sounded a second time. That it became a metaphor hours later, after the Toronto Blue Jays manager executed an organizational plan by pulling Jose Berrios, in spite of a performance that clearly merited more rope, in the fourth inning of what ended as a season-ending 2-0 loss to the Minnesota Twins, seems apt.

The pitching change may be the most polarizing in-game decision ever made in franchise history and the fall-out from it, both internally and within the toxic-fire-discourse externally, certainly qualifies as a ring-the-alarm Blue Jays emergency.

To unpack it all, it’s FAQ time, based on the questions I’ve received from within and outside the industry in the hours since it all went down.

Q: Dude, WTF?

A: I totally hear you. I could see the logic behind yanking a dealing Matt Shoemaker for Robbie Ray in Game 1 of the 2020 wild-card series against the Tampa Bay Rays. Pulling Kevin Gausman in Game 2 of the wild-card round a year ago against the Seattle Mariners can be debated but I think it was the right call after Carlos Santana had been on the right-hander in his previous at-bats. Bigger picture, I didn’t even hate Kevin Cash pulling Blake Snell in Game 6 of the 2020 World Series — they were staying true to who they were and Mookie Betts is a hell of a problem.

Removing Berrios, though, even if Yusei Kikuchi had escaped the fourth unscathed, is indefensible because of how it schisms the organization. The numbers on Berrios versus lefties are what they are, and I get the notion of forcing the Twins to flip some of their lefties for a better bullpen path later in the game. But Berrios was as nails as he’s been with the Blue Jays in that outing. Eight whiffs on 25 swings. No hard contact. No long at-bats where the Twins looked to be timing him up. He wasn’t getting through innings, he was dominating them.

The change was forcing a plan on a game blind to the flow of play, while in the process telling one of your star pitchers that you don’t trust him versus Max Kepler and Alex Kirilloff, very good but not great hitters, a second time through. It’s totally dissonant to brag about the rotation’s strength only to do that.

Q: So, fire Schneider ASAP, right?

A: Wrong. Schneider is wearing this and while you can argue that maybe he should have fought off organizational thinking and abandoned that game plan, well that just isn’t how things work when it’s your ass in the jackpot, as Tom Hallion might say. I refuse to believe that Schneider or pitching coach Pete Walker were down with this. Schneider didn’t speak with his usual conviction in explaining the decision-making post-game Wednesday and I’m not sure all of it can be attributed to the raw emotions of a season-ending loss.

The problem here is that Schneider (and the rest of the coaching staff) has to answer to the players and he gets caught between the organizational decision-making and his clubhouse, impacting his credibility within the group. In part, that’s what I think happened with Charlie Montoyo, players feeling disconnected from him and him seemingly withdrawing because he couldn’t square what he was executing nightly with what he actually wanted to do.

As a result, the club factionalizes — front office, coaching staff, players — and while everyone is grinding their heinies off to win, there’s too much inefficiency. In that way, firing Schneider without addressing the same core issues that existed before him accomplishes nothing but changing the façade. He’s an easy answer for anyone seeking one.

Q. Well, can we blame analytics then?

A: No and casting analytics as a one-stop boogieman every time things go wrong is flat-out ignorant. You want to dump analytics? Go ahead, hope you enjoy being the Kansas City Royals. The Blue Jays have a strong analytics department that provides players and coaches with a competitive advantage, and is a big part of the club’s success in recent years.

The challenge, and this is industry-wide, not just Blue-Jays-centric, is how to weigh out the different streams of information and factor it into decision-making. Understanding that lefties hit 16 of the 25 homers Berrios gave up in 2023, that his slurve and backdoor sinkers sometimes break right into their bat path, is helpful and can aid in good decision-making. But it’s problematic when a plan designed to, for example, counteract a 60 per cent probable outcome is held rigidly in the face of a 40-per-cent-probable performance. Is the coaching staff empowered to deviate, to trust what the game flow is telling them, without having to answer for it afterwards?

A manager should be put it in place to apply information against what he sees, not just follow a manual. Not every decision can be objective and allowing for some subjective, for what some might describe as feel, is the secret sauce. This is my interpretation here, but when Bo Bichette said that with the way Berrios was pitching “he deserves some trust in the biggest moments” and more broadly, that “from the top to the bottom of this organization, we need to reflect to see how we can be better,” I think that’s partly what he's getting at.

Q. What does the front office do with all of this?

A. That’s the crux of this off-season and it isn’t the easy-answer, pound-of-flesh fireable stuff. Of all the conversations I had in the clubhouse Wednesday, the comments that stuck out most to me were the ones from Bichette above, Cavan Biggio saying the pitching change “was confusing just because we hadn’t done that at all this year,” and perhaps most damningly of all, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. saying, “I think we’ve got to get better decisions on everything.” Players don’t say things like that if they’re confident about the organizational operation, if they have full trust in how games are being run.

That speaks louder than any of the more pop-out quotes that emerged, because that’s a far larger problem than a bad result in one key game. And while I can envision backs getting up about this, this decision was really a microcosm of the structural problems the Blue Jays endured all season, as I wrote Wednesday night. If process is the way to judge results, then this season was a failure not because the Blue Jays got swept in the wild-card round, but because this group underperformed its potential.

The deep dive necessary is into what internal factors allowed that to happen. That’s essential because Guerrero, Bichette, Jordan Romano and Danny Jansen are nearing free agency while Gausman, Berrios, and George Springer are each one year closer to decline and one of the best pitching staffs in franchise history wasn’t maximized. This is just as bad as 2021, when trying to lock down games with Rafael Dolis, Tyler Chatwood, Anthony Castro, Joel Payamps and Travis Bergen for two months cost them a playoff berth. Ascribing 2023 to bad luck and randomness is perilous.

Q. Umm, that doesn’t make me feel better.

A. It’s not meant to. That’s simply where the Blue Jays are right now. They have a smart front office. There is a lot of good on the major-league roster. But the vast majority of organizational talent is centralized in the big leagues, so they have to capitalize. There’s no mass wave in the farm system coming. Hence, there is a lot to improve on.

And they didn’t just lose Wednesday, they also shook faith in how they run a game during their most important game of the year. If the front office says, “we were a couple of feet away from a different outcome,” which is true, that will be ducking the issues. Because if Kikuchi had escaped the fourth, and if Chapman’s drive down the line in the sixth touched fair, everything wouldn’t suddenly be OK.

So, this is where the hard work starts. This is where everybody needs to get comfortable being uncomfortable.