SEATTLE — As Blue Jays manager John Schneider took two steps onto the field on Thursday night, every conversation he’d ever had with Max Scherzer cycled in his brain like a stop-motion film.
That recall, general manager Ross Atkins said recently, is Schneider’s foundation. The fourth-year manager possesses a heightened ability to recite specific plays from specific games even months or years later. In his mind, he’s built a baseball Rolodex, which is what he used to determine whether a screaming Scherzer was telling the truth.
In the midst of the Blue Jays’ 8-2 Game 4 win over the Seattle Mariners, Schneider leaned on that stored knowledge to weigh whether to believe a likely future Hall of Famer, who insisted that he was good to keep pitching. Schneider ultimately left Scherzer in to finish the fifth inning, and then later allowed him to go back out for more. The result was yet more evidence of the manager’s evolution.
“The more you can learn, the faster you learn,” Schneider said during a conversation in his office last month, “that’s the one competitive advantage that will never go away. How you adjust from things you messed up.”
It’s those instances — every decision, good or bad — that Schneider learns from now. It’s those lessons that have made Schneider more comfortable in his role than ever before. What he calls a competitive advantage has helped him guide the Blue Jays to within two wins of the World Series. And in the process, his feel for his pitcher in the moment helped to author what became the latest flourish in what has been a memorable October.
Schneider’s lowest points as a manager have been extensively documented through thousands of written words, hours of television and endless talk radio dedicated to dissecting. The decisions that work out, not so much. Such is the life of a big league manager, especially one whose team was swept in the postseason two years in a row.
Some began adding more blunders to the list when the Blue Jays dropped two games at the Rogers Centre to begin the ALCS — when Schneider offered up more pitching changes for fans to debate. But only one man is tasked with learning from those moments. Schneider has to show up the next day and make another choice in a tense October inning, just as he did on Thursday by sticking with Scherzer.
“You have to manage people,” John Schneider said. “You have to manage feelings and emotions.” (Daniel Shirey / MLB Photos via Getty Images)
When he thinks of the decisions he’s learned from the most, two moments immediately jump to mind. He has many more, he’s happy to share, but the first two are the ones you’re probably thinking of: Pulling Kevin Gausman in Game 2 of the 2022 Wild Card Series, which kickstarted Toronto’s collapse against the Mariners, and prematurely ending José Berríos’ 2023 playoff start in Minnesota.
For some, the lesson from those choices could be to stick with starting pitchers. Let the rotation horses work, like they used to in baseball’s glory days. The tale is more nuanced, though. The actual takeaway, Schneider said, is deeper.
“You have to manage people,” Schneider said. “You have to manage feelings and emotions.”
The management happens before the decision, not during. It happened when the Jays signed Scherzer in February, and Schneider began building the Rolodex of conversations from which he consulted when the critical moment arrived in Game 4. Before the 41-year-old even inked a deal with the Blue Jays, Schneider thought about the inevitable moment he’d have to walk to the mound and make the call.
Pull Mad Max in the middle of an inning, or let him stay in?
But experience taught Schneider to anticipate.
In May, months before he’d find himself making a critical call in this same ballpark, Schneider pulled the entire starting rotation into a room. Toronto’s starting group is filled with veterans, guys who admittedly were raised in the old school. Schneider felt the need to explain, to get everyone on the same page. They talked through the difficulty of facing a lineup for the third time. He outlined how pitching coach Pete Walker and the rest of Toronto’s coaching staff make decisions — such as when a middle reliever’s first pitch is more effective than a workhorse’s 96th. Schneider asked for the pitchers’ thoughts. He heard them out.
The next day, Schneider sent Bowden Francis back out for inning after inning against the Mariners. He left the righty in for a second trip through the order and then a third. To that point, he was the Jays starter who had paid the steepest third-time-through penalty. He appeared on paper to be the obvious choice to yank early. Yet, in what became a 6-3 win, Schneider pushed Francis out there to record just his third quality start of the season. When Schneider finally marched to the mound in the seventh to take the ball, members of the rotation gathered by the dugout railing and laughed.
“I was like, ‘See, you can do it. I’m not saying it’s impossible,’” Schneider said. “Wanted them to remember the things that we’re talking about that go into the decision-making.”
It’s those conversations that have the 2025 Blue Jays working as one. The team’s veterans — Chris Bassitt and Kevin Gausman among them — say they’re more in line with the organization’s front office than ever before. It’s Schneider, the connective tissue between players and executives, who has been tasked with growing that bond. He manages people.
Scherzer entered Thursday’s outing with a 1.073 OPS when facing a lineup for the third time. If Baseball Reference could talk, it would’ve screamed for Schneider to end Scherzer’s outing at 4 2/3 innings with one run against. It would’ve been a defensible move for a guy that hadn’t pitched in weeks and hadn’t recorded an out in the sixth inning since mid-August. But Schneider walked to the mound with every past conversation catalogued in his mind, with every lesson informing each step. He returned to the dugout without a baseball in his hand.
There will be no postgame debate about Schneider’s move. It will be celebrated. That’s what happens when decisions work and teams win. There are numbers, plans, advice and many meetings, but it’s Schneider who has to step onto the field. It’s the manager that has to make the decision and stand in front of cameras to explain it. Schneider’s learned to accept this bargain.
“You make the best decision in real time based on what you’re seeing,” Schneider said. “No matter how it works out, you’re good with it.”
Schneider’s wife, Jessy, asks him the same question every offseason: “Do you still love it?”
His answer, always, is yes.
“Then figure it out,” Jessy says.
Every spring, Schneider has no qualms about once again embarking on the months-long baseball journey that is guaranteed to end too early for 29 teams. Every year, he hopes to get better. He makes mistakes and yearns to learn from them. He’s a product of every decision and interaction from his 23-year professional baseball career, one that began as a depth catcher in the Blue Jays’ minors, and has since evolved into the position he’s in now. He’s leading the same franchise deep into the postseason.
It’s a career, just like anyone else’s, littered with mistakes and defensible decisions gone awry. But Schneider’s learned from his, or at least tried to, and on Thursday those lessons served him well as he trusted the word of a screaming pitcher and pushed his Jays one step closer to their ultimate goal.
“It’s fulfilling as s—,” Schneider said. “Because this game is so hard.”
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