Let's step into The Charlie Discourse

The Blue Jays just won a series in Cleveland after winning one in New York. They’re above .500, with a playoff spot still in their sights and a easier schedule on the horizon. So let’s talk about the manager!

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As an in-game, tactical baseball manager Charlie Montoyo leaves a lot to be desired. There’s really no getting around it.

That isn’t to say I don’t think fans are often much to harsh on him, because I absolutely do. Some of the vitriol I see hurled his way when the Jays lose tough ones, like they did in game two of their doubleheader against Cleveland on Sunday, can be pretty unfair. It reminds me of the way fans reacted to Mark Shapiro in the early years, when the relationship was so poisoned that every perceived misstep reinforced the conclusions drawn from the previous perceived misstep, snowballing on and on completely disconnected from reality until Shapiro seemed to practically take the form of a cartoon villain in the eyes of many fans. Even completely innocuous things — like, in Charlie’s case, his quote about being proud of his team’s comeback in a game they lost to Tampa last week — end up fodder for nastiness. It also reminds me of John Farrell, who was a disaster as a manager until he won the World Series the year after he left the Jays. Or John Gibbons, who a huge number of Jays fans thought was an awful manager basically right up until the moment his teams got really good.

There’s a lesson in all that, I think. And yet you don’t exactly see me out there mocking unhinged Montoyo haters on Twitter in a way akin to “FYRE GOBBONS!!!” do you? Partly that’s because being a smarmy jerk online just isn’t my idea of fun anymore. But mostly it’s because Charlie makes it hard. It turns out that “Come on, Charlie didn’t do three egregious things that cost the Blue Jays the game, he did at most one egregious thing that cost the Blue Jays the game” isn’t a hill worth dying on.

Not that I usually think Charlie’s boners are quite that significant. But Sunday was a tough one.

Some game-specific thoughts:

• I had absolutely no problem with him removing Ross Stripling after five innings of game one to go to Rafael Dolis then Jordan Romano to close it out. I don’t care how good Stripling’s last two outings have been, he’s still Ross Stripling. It’s absolutely fair to have lifted him before facing the top of Cleveland’s order a third time, especially with the bullpen in outstanding shape. In fact, Montoyo chose to push on with Steven Matz in the sixth inning of in game two, despite the top of the order coming up, and that was exactly where things went awry.

• I also had no problem with the choice to go back to Tyler Chatwood to start the bottom of the seventh inning of game two, even though it hadn’t exactly looked like he was at his best in the sixth. Chatwood has been great for the Blue Jays this year. He’s an important veteran who has earned some trust, and who seemed to feel slighted when Montoyo pulled him at the first sign of trouble a week ago against the Rays in Dunedin. I think it’s completely understandable that a regular Mr. Positivity like Charlie would give Chatwood the opportunity to prove he deserves more trust by sending him back out there in the ninth — and not just for positivity’s sake, but because Chatwood has been good this year, because with Dolis and Romano having pitched in game one (which, again, was absolutely fine) the other options weren’t exactly great, and because maybe a clean inning there would even help snap him out of his funk.

(Aside: I think it’s probably worth remembering here that many fans trusted Chatwood so much a week ago that they were outraged when Montoyo lifted him.)

(Second aside: Other fans were more outraged that day when Montoyo chose to go to Travis Bergen instead of Jordan Romano, just as many were mad on Sunday that Romano wasn’t asked to close out both games of the doubleheader in Cleveland — views I imagine I’d be more sympathetic to if I was incapable of remembering Romano’s injury history, the Blue Jays’ current injury situation, or the unprecedented number of injuries league-wide so far this season. He can’t pitch all the innings.)

• What I think was indefensible on Sunday was the fact that nobody was warming up in the seventh inning, ready to take over for Chatwood in case he continued to struggle.

For one thing, if Chatwood can’t handle that “slight,” you have bigger problems with him than just his being a bit cranky at getting the hook last week. For another, we’re not talking about the Chatwood of April who was humming along like the best version of himself. We’re talking about a Chatwood who had walked five batters over his previous three innings (after walking just four in his first 17 innings of the season). A Chatwood who was fighting his command in the sixth. A Chatwood who has been putting in extra work during the week to try to get right.

“Chatwood worked on Friday down in the bullpen,” explained Buck Martinez on the Sportsnet TV broadcast in the sixth, “and he was working on his delivery, coming straight toward home plate. He put in some work down there with Nevin Ashley and Matt Buschmann, just trying to get back in his right lanes and get back in the strike zone.”

So here’s a guy who has been plagued by lapses of command throughout his career, who has struggled with command in the last week, who struggled with command the previous inning, and who wasn’t bound by the three-batter rule. And here’s a bullpen that, other than Trent Thornton and the guys who pitched in game one, hadn’t been used since Thursday and was looking at an off-day Monday.

Going to Chatwood there at all was debatable — fine, as I said above, but certainly debatable — but having no one up just in case was absolutely not. And it somehow got even worse from there.

Chatwood’s seven pitches in the sixth produced four balls and three balls in play. His next seven pitches were all balls except for a middle-middle sinker that Josh Naylor missed and turned into a fly out.

If someone had been ready in the bullpen this would have a good time to bring him in, considering what had happened in the sixth. But even if you had made the grievous mistake of not having anybody warming up in case Chatwood faltered, this would have at least been the time to start rushing to get somebody up. Right?

Not for the Blue Jays on Sunday! Chatwood issued a four pitch walk to Bradley Zimmer, received a visit from pitching coach Pete Walker, threw two balls to César Hernández, and only then did we start to see Anthony Castro scrambling to get ready.

Managers are armed with more information than fans have, and I think that’s important to keep in mind whenever you’re trying to give one a fair shake. But in this case I think the crucial thing was something that we had all learned in the sixth: that Chatwood was still having such a tough time with his command that he felt the need to specifically work on it in the bullpen this week.

Maybe that Friday session went particularly well. But after the week he’s had? After the career he’s had? After the sixth inning he had? There’s no excuse for sending him up on a tightrope without a net, even if that’s what the manager believed he wanted and deserved.

It’s inexcusable.

That’s not to say it’s a fireable offence, although I completely understand why people who think Charlie has already had a bunch of those would believe that it was. Personally, I’m not there. For me, many of the things Charlie has done to outrage fans fall into the category of typical manager stuff — the same mix of damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t situations, well intentioned moves gone awry, and picking the wrong side of a coin flip that every fan base tends to get irrational about.

That said, those last ones do add up. For example, I think there was a fairly sound case to go to Bergen against the Rays last week, which for me made that implosion more unfortunate than egregious. But if Romano was actually available — I’m still not sure that he was, and I wasn’t convinced that him throwing lightly in the bullpen later on that game proved it — there was at least as good a case to go to him, and maybe even better. And, as I’ve said, going to Dolis and Romano in game one on Sunday was completely fine. Locking down that game, and the series win, was undoubtedly good. But if it was going to leave nobody in the bullpen for game two that the manager trusted — save for Chatwood, who was seemingly only being trusted as a gimmick to try to help him work through his issues — maybe leaving Stripling in a bit longer was as good a play.

Lately Charlie seems to be landing on the wrong side of those calls a little too much. Forgivable stuff in a vacuum, I think. But noticeable, and certainly not the only things not to like about how he handles this phase of his job. I hate the two-strike bunting, and don’t usually like the bunting in general (Danny Jansen’s bunt in the top of the seventh of game two, setting up Marcus Semien’s go-ahead RBI after Jonathan Davis got on with no outs, being one of the few I could agree with). The failure to double switch that ended up with Alejandro Kirk on second base to start extra innings back in April was a bad one. This Chatwood debacle in Cleveland was a bad one. Whatever happened last year in Atlanta with Jacob Waguespack and the lineup card was probably a bad one.

I hesitate to give validation to the frothing masses, but clearly this isn’t a well-oiled tactical machine.

So how can the Blue Jays possibly expect to win in the playoffs with this guy at the helm? What do they do about all this?

Well, I think they do the same thing every organization that’s striving to become the best in the sport does as a matter of course: they try to manager-proof their roster.

Modern teams aren’t out there relying on their manager’s wily tactics to steal wins and playoff series. That’s why they tend to value other things. In hiring Montoyo the Jays made clear that they prioritized above all else a positive attitude, willingness to play young players, and openness to data-driven decisions. In 2017, Jon Morosi tweeted that Yankees GM Brian Cashman described the manager’s job as “part White House Press Secretary . . . part psychologist with players . . . collaborator with ownership and a front office that’s hands-on . . . presence, leadership, appreciation for analytical streams, the medical team . . . ”. The Red Sox and the Astros (prior to Dusty Baker) obviously value guys who are really good at cheating. It takes all kinds!

The roster is really the thing. Players who can execute are the thing.

The roster is at the root of more of these issues than we sometimes like to acknowledge. As much as it was a failure on Charlie’s part to shove Chatwood out of the airplane with no parachute in the seventh on Sunday, he was not exactly being helped in that situation by the fact that with Dolis and Romano unavailable there was no obvious alternative to the guy who currently can’t throw strikes. Anthony Castro, A.J. Cole, Carl Edwards Jr., Tim Mayza, Joel Payamps, and Trent Thornton are not exactly a murderer's row of lights-out options to close out a one-run game. You want a manager to put his players in a position to succeed, but that was a pretty big ask there no matter which direction Charlie went. He’d have taken heat for going away from Chatwood if one of those guys came out to start the seventh and predictably blown it, too.

And back in April, when Charlie’s management of the ‘pen was basically unassailable? Julian Merryweather, Castro, Chatwood, Mayza, and Bergen each had an ERA of 0.00 for the month. David Phelps had a 1.23 ERA in April. Trent Thornton had a 2.35 ERA coming out of the 'pen. Joel Payamps was at 2.38, and Rafael Dolis were both at 3.18. ERA is not a great measure of a reliever's worth, but needless to say those guys were all going extremely well. It’s a lot easier to choose the right side of the coin when that’s the case. Unsurprisingly, the howls for the manager’s head tend to get quieter then too.

That’s not to wave away Charlie’s influence entirely or to say that fans shouldn’t be mad when winnable ballgames are lost. Sunday was bullshit. Be mad. Just maybe don’t get confused about it if Charlie starts to appear smarter as the quality of the players at his disposal improves.