TORONTO – Amid questions about why a highly talented team is once again less than the sum of its parts, the Toronto Blue Jays fired Charlie Montoyo on Wednesday and appointed John Schneider to take his place for the rest of the year on an interim basis.
Casey Candaele was promoted from triple-A Buffalo to fill in as Schneider’s bench coach. It’s the club’s first mid-season firing of a manager since then-GM J.P. Ricciardi replaced John Gibbons with Cito Gaston after a 35-39 start in 2008.
This change for the 46-42 Blue Jays comes during a jarring stretch in which the club mourned the death of first base coach Mark Budzinski’s daughter, Julia, and lost nine times in 10 games, holding its second known players-only meeting of the season.
Montoyo praised the club’s leadership group for calling that meeting but it was a sign of building frustration within the group. Telling were comments from a pair of veterans: George Springer said “everybody is trying to find out why [the team is struggling] instead of just going out there and playing,” while reliever David Phelps added that “we just need to keep picking each other up, [in] all aspects of the game, just lifting each other up and pulling together 26 guys.”
The messaging there was different than the one put forward by Montoyo, who said he hadn’t addressed the team during its recent difficult stretch because “when a manager comes and talks, they think he’s panicking.” Montoyo continually conveyed his inherent optimism.
Perhaps that was symbolic of a disconnect, and enough pressure had built up over a 1-6 road trip for general manager Ross Atkins to fire a manager who, back in spring training, he’d extended through 2023 with a club option for 2024. While it was meant to be a vote of confidence then, the short term of the deal left the front office with enough leeway to pull an escape chute.
Certainly the timing is important and the overriding question for the Blue Jays remains why they continue to underperform their abilities? Through the upheaval of the pandemic summer of 2020 and the three-home-city trek of 2021, the core of this team continually demonstrated good fight, but one school of thought is that the group too often falls back on its talent and lapses in necessary focus.
One comparison raised is the San Diego Padres from last year.
It’s unclear how much of that can fairly be laid on Montoyo, a manager of the year finalist in 2020 and someone who drew praise for his steadying presence last year.
After all, if Jose Berrios, Bo Bichette and Teoscar Hernandez are all performing to career norms and if the bullpen has one or two more legitimate leverage arms, we’re not having this discussion.
Then again, why is it that they aren’t having career years? Why is it that the Blue Jays let so many winnable games slip away? That their .240 batting average with runners in scoring position is 23rd in the majors, despite such a potent offence?
And whose duty is it to enforce accountability for lapses in the field, like the one on June 5, when Guerrero and Hernandez took the field without sunglasses, leading to two costly dropped fly balls?
Montoyo is a kindhearted man and, in some ways, always felt like he was caught between his own instincts, the front office and his clubhouse. But in many ways, that’s the role these days: buffering between the three realms to find a happy medium.
The Blue Jays are talented enough to paper over many of their flaws but after missing the playoffs by one game last year, they know the perils of being too cavalier.
As Springer noted over the weekend, “it’s a lot easier for people to look at the standings and say, you’ve got to do this and you’ve got to do that, as opposed to early in the year [when] you can say, ‘I’ve still got time.’
“I just said, ‘We all understand what our job is or what the task at hand is. We can’t be concerned about other teams and standings and all that stuff. We’ve just got to go play, control ourselves and see what happens at the end of the day.’”
Often, that’s easier said than done. Montoyo, for whatever reason, wasn’t able to wring out the best of this roster. For now, it’s Schneider’s turn.
