We are now entering The Charlie Discourse...
Here we go again.
Should the Blue Jays fire Charlie Montoyo? No.
Ah, but will the Blue Jays fire Charlie Montoyo? Also no.
OK, now that that’s settled, let’s talk about it!…
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It takes about two seconds of thought to understand where the narrative would go if the Blue Jays fired Charlie Montoyo — whether that be this week, next week, or, realistically, at any point before the trade deadline — and why the front office would have to be out of their minds with desperation to do it.
Let’s think about a few things such a move would actually accomplish, shall we?
• It would signal to core players who are expected to be here for a very long time that the club doesn’t believe that they’ll begin to produce as expected without a drastic change, that these players don’t care enough, and that they’re in need of a wake-up call.
• It would especially bring heat onto young, core players like Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette for their performances.
• It would bring intense heat, and rightly so, onto the front office for roster construction, for hiring Montoyo in the first place, and for tying his hands with directives from High Performance and wherever else.
• It would be an unbelievably awful look for the front office given how little time has passed since the Budzinski tragedy.
• It would be an admission that something is fundamentally wrong here that can’t easily be fixed by a couple of deadline tweaks and a bit of patience.
Other than the Budzinski aspect, which I hope we can all agree would be utterly classless, I’m sure there are many fans out there who would not only be fine with all that, they’d be fine with it for those reasons. In fact, I know there are, because I’ve seen their tweets.
There’s a strain of thinking out there that these players need scrutiny, need urgency, need a fire lit under them. Underlying this is a massive assumption being made about what’s not going on in the background. That, to me, is about as stupid as assuming Charlie is an unserious man because he plays the bongos, or that he’s out of his depth because he doesn’t give paragraphs worth of nuanced analysis in his second language when speaking to reporters. But hey, when has not knowing the full picture ever stopped fans from demanding they be given the brief serotonin blast that comes from getting a decent guy fired for no good reason because their team had a terrible week?
Ah, but rather than getting wrapped up arguing with straw men, even if some happen to be made of more tangible stuff, let’s try to think about these points as the front office might.
It would signal to core players who are expected to be here for a very long time that the club doesn’t believe that they’ll begin to produce as expected without a drastic change, that these players don’t care enough, and that they’re in need of a wake-up call.
I don’t for a second think that these players don’t understand that the results and their performances recently have been unacceptable, or that they don’t remember what it felt like last season to come up one game short of the playoffs. This also feels like an incredibly odd message to send from an organization that so has deliberately pursued its Team Vibes philosophy.
These Jays value players with a “low pulse.” They want guys who can stay loose, rather than ones wound too tightly. They’ve also unmistakably tried to foster a culture of unity, respect, and belief in each other — something that showed up recently, when Yusei Kikuchi spoke about how his teammates had been trying to cheer him up during his awful struggles throughout the year so far, but that goes much deeper than that.
I wrote about this stuff in a previous life, back in 2018, when Charlie had just been hired and we were all trying to sort out how he would fit into the organization the Blue Jays were trying to become. I noted how GM Ross Atkins had beamed at a Pitch Talks event when relaying the story of Ryan Borucki giving Thomas Pannone a pair of headphones, and what it said about their environment that two guys competing for the same big league spot would be so good natured with each other. I also wrote this, about a statement Atkins had made on an episode of Sportsnet’s At the Letters podcast back in November 2017.
Speaking of his own minor league experience, and the important parts of the culture he came from in the Cleveland system that he wants to import here, Atkins stressed the value of the kind of positivity Montoyo purports to bring. “You knew that the front office was embracing for you and was pulling for you in every possible way. You felt that,” he said.
Granted, these quotes were more about minor league player development, and the stakes are certainly higher for the Jays currently in a win-now season with a sputtering big league team, but guys like Vlad and Bo are still quite young, and it would shock me to see the team do something so drastic rather than holding to principles they’ve elucidated for a long time.
With service clocks ticking and expensive free agents on long-term deals not getting any younger, the need to win at the big league level has superseded developmental concerns, but I still find it extremely hard to believe that these Blue Jays would undermine their own deeply considered philosophy and their players’ sense that the front office believes in them just to change horses in mid stream here, especially considering everything that came together over the last week or so to get them here.
Fans may be able to wave away five games in four days against the pesky Rays, the death of a coach’s daughter, a cross-country trip with no off-day, and the rotation going sideways with Kevin Gausman’s injury and Kikuchi’s total ineffectiveness as mere excuses, but those are really difficult circumstances in a sport where even the best teams lose 40% of the time and there’s no equivalent to skating harder.
The Jays showed incredible resiliency in 2021, coming within a game of the playoffs despite having to play in minor league facilities for two thirds of the year — a fact that certainly isn’t lost of the front office, even if it may be lost on fans who choose to see it as a failure of the manager to properly lead the team to glory — so for them to say now that this ebb is too tough for the group as constituted? I just don’t see it.
It would especially bring heat onto young, core players like Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette for their performances.
Back in the spring of 2021, Mark Shapiro spoke to the Athletic’s Kaitlyn McGrath about the pressure Vlad and Bo (and Cavan Biggio) are under to lead the team offensively, and what the additions of guys like George Springer and Marcus Semien meant in that regard. His response:
It’s always been a struggle for all of us to think about the amount of responsibility and pressure we were putting on three young players to lead, to perform at a time when most guys are just thinking about acclimating to the major leagues and trying to survive and build a strong foundation. Those guys were a core part of why we went out and added because of the strength of our belief in them, both as teammates and players. But I think a side benefit of adding experienced players that get a lot of attention has been (that) it allows them to step back and just be other good players on our team.
They’re going to be superstar players, but allow them to have that happen in a more natural progression instead of drop them in with those expectations. It’s hard enough just to play and adjust to the major leagues and establish yourself without the expectation that you also have to lead and you also have to be the star player on the team. That’s all going to happen for those players in time anyway because of their talent and their work habits, but now, it doesn’t have to happen right away.
Pressure points change, even within the space of a year, but I again have a really hard time seeing this front office make such an obvious scapegoat of the manager, because it would invite tougher questions on guys like Bo and Vlad, and likely only make things more challenging for them. If you ask me, the “light a fire under them by bringing in an asshole” stuff comes from people who’ve either seen too many movies or are assholes.
Plus, a not insignificant part of a modern manager’s role is to be the guy we’re talking about right now. Which brings me to my next point…
It would bring intense heat, and rightly so, onto the front office for roster construction, for hiring Montoyo in the first place, and for tying his hands with directives from High Performance and wherever else.
Compared to the tumultuous start to their tenure in Toronto, Shapiro and Atkins have it pretty easy these last several months. Constructing a team that just about everybody predicted would win the American League East will do a thing like that. But obviously when those kinds of expectations aren’t being met the temperature starts to rise. There are questions about the composition of this roster right now — particularly the bullpen, for the second straight year, and starting pitching depth for, like, the fourth — that I think are significantly more important than anything to do with the manager.
If they were to let Charlie go, how long would it be before the target was on Atkins’ back? How long before we’d start hearing things like “he couldn’t build a bullpen so he fired the manager to cover his own ass”? Thirty seconds? Ten?
How long would it take for Charlie-haters to suddenly get awfully sympathetic to the idea that he doesn’t have a whole lot of choice in matters they get most upset at him about — lineup construction, who gets the day off, who is available to pitch, which pitcher is used when, etc.?
It’s not like those are new notions. Here’s something I wrote in that same piece from 2018:
All of this relates back to Montoyo in the sense that his development credentials aren’t so much about his ability to magically turn decent players into better ones, but his willingness to be a cog in that machine, and to serve top-down goals rather than operating on an island. His success and longevity in the Rays organization speaks to that.
Meanwhile, his competitiveness and emphasis on positivity connect to what the Jays are thinking in terms of how culture and environment create buy-in from players. The way Atkins tells it, that puts the club in the position they want to be, not just when it comes to achieving specific developmental goals but all sorts of things. For example, integrating analytics into on-field decision-making; the willingness of players to use the resources of the high performance department — which covers not only injury prevention and recovery, but sports psychology; and, more simply, getting everybody pulling in the same direction.
I understand that Ross Atkins has stepped on a few rakes in his day, but this one has a giant blinking neon sign pointing at it. I couldn’t imagine it would cost him his job to can Charlie, but we’ll all get whiplash trying to follow how quickly the takes go from “they finally fired Montoyo” to “Hey Ross, wasn’t this your guy following your orders?”
It would get ugly.
It would also likely demand more autonomy for the next guy, which is something the front office very much would not want.
It would be an unbelievably awful look for the front office given how little time has passed since the Budzinski tragedy.
I very much don’t like discussing the PR framing of something involving all-too-real human tragedy that’s happened within the Jays’ inner circle, so I don’t want to dwell on that aspect of it much, except to say that it would be hugely out of character for this organization to make a move with the manager at a time like this, with the team very much heartbroken for their coach, colleague, and friend.
The Jays speak about family a lot, and think about family a lot. They acknowledge players’ families in press conferences after signings, but it goes beyond that. Here’s what Kevin Gausman had so say about that aspect of ultimately signing with the club when he was introduced back in December.
We had a Zoom meeting with Ross and Shannon (Curley, Senior Manager, Player Relations & Community Marketing), one of their family directors, and they really kind of blew us away, honestly, with how they run the organization and their family-first mentality, which is huge. I have two kids now, so that's something that you definitely have to think of. It's not just me going to another country now, it's the three of them too. So, really, it was, like I said, I knew that they were talented, it was just a matter of learning more about the organization.
Baseball never stops, even when your world is shattered by something like what’s happened with Budzinski, and the Jays have spoken about having to come to grips with that over the last week. It’s not easy even when the disruptions are meaningless by comparison — something Shapiro acknowledged in his interview with Kaitlyn, when he was asked about what he’d seen and learned from his players after having to go through such uncertainty regarding where they were going to play in 2020 and early 2021.
I think it’s just enhanced my respect and my belief in a group that I already cared about and believed in. It’s been somewhat remarkable how little complaints that we’ve heard — no whining, no complaining, no excuse-making. All those opportunities for legitimate excuse-making and complaining have been presented to them on a silver platter, particularly for professional athletes who usually live a very different existence than the rest of the population.
They’ve been subject to many of the same things that almost all people are enduring. But those things, as you mentioned, fly in the face of the routine and normalcy that kind of dictates a baseball player’s life. And that normalcy, that routine, that daily schedule is all they’ve ever known their whole lives.
As David Phelps told Rob Longley of the Sun over the weekend, between the white lines nobody is going to feel sorry for these guys. The players certainly aren’t ones to make excuses, but I’m not sure fans fully appreciate what all this has meant for where their heads — and their routines — are at. The front office understands it all too well, sadly. And would upend a ton of the work they’ve done with a move so openly callous.
It would be an admission that something is fundamentally wrong here that can’t easily be fixed by a couple of deadline tweaks and a bit of patience.
I don’t want to make it sound as though Montoyo is someone the Blue Jays cannot or would not ever fire. A lot of the concerns here go away once the season ends, and going into a new year with a new manager and some new coaches can’t be ruled out. Maybe a fresh start is warranted. I can’t say that it isn’t any more than someone who isn’t working with this club day in and day out can say that the manager obviously needs to go.
But to get rid of him at some point here before the trade deadline, when the suits actually have a chance to finally give him a better roster to work with? I think that would be unfair to him in a way that the front office would very much care about, even if plenty of fans might not. It would also completely betray a lack of confidence in their own abilities to get this ship righted in any other way — and that’s a lack of confidence that I very much do not believe exists.
Read the terms of Yusei Kikuchi’s contract and his numbers with the Mariners last year if you don’t think this group is confident in their abilities. You’re going to look at what they gave Gausman and José Berríos, and what they gave up to get Berríos and Matt Chapman, and tell me they’re going to suddenly get cold feet about this group? Exactly at the point when the trade market is about to start moving? When believing in themselves and each other has been made such a core of this team’s identity?
When they understand the value of patience?
There are countless examples of this front office — and every other front office in the sport, literally forever! — being exceedingly more patient than fans would ever be when deciding to send a player down, bring a player up, make a move on the trade market, etc. The idea that this would be how and when they choose hit the panic button is as absurd to me as… well… as the idea that this how and when they should be choosing to hit the panic button.
You can scream “urgency” and “accountability” until you’re blue in the face, if they’re just changing the one guy and handing red/yellow/green pitcher usage cards to someone else, what on earth does anyone think that would change? I’m sure it would please a bunch of fans with soiled diapies who just want the bongo man to go away and believe that with it would go the kinds of baserunning gaffes and defensive miscues that literally every team makes, but what an actually reasonable person thinks will come of this I have absolutely no clue.
Hell, Charlie’s tactical decisions, no doubt with heavy oversight from the front office, have come a long way in recent years. One of the few things you could have reasonably criticized him for and suddenly he’s fine! Yet now people think they desperately need some old school hard-ass to come in and do it his way? Hookay.
You can think that if you really want to. If you think the Blue Jays are on the same page as you with that, however, you might be in for a very long and disappointing summer.
At least on that front. The team will be fine.1
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Or they won’t. But most likely they will! What, are you’re afraid of the fucking Orioles now?
Ah...so looking forward to the sequel to this. Talk about us all reading the tea leaves wrong!
Should have held off posting for 48 hrs