We are now exiting The Charlie Discourse...
The Blue Jays did an unexpected thing last week. Should it have been so unexpected, though? Here, finally, is a look back at the end of Charlie Montoyo's tenure and an attempt to make sense of it all.
Welp. This certainly didn’t age very well, did it?
I’ve taken some time to digest this one, and let the dust settle a bit, but it’s well past time now to get on with it. So… the Charlie thing… here we go…
Last Wednesday morning the Blue Jays fired Charlie Montoyo, appointing bench coach John Schneider as the club’s new manager and, more importantly, making me look like a real asshole!
There was at least one omission from what I wrote earlier in the week about why the Jays wouldn’t fire Montoyo, which seems rather glaring in retrospect: any sense of what the players might think in all of this. Whoops!
That, to me, is where we have to begin to process this change.
It’s not terribly difficult to see how the players’ wishes would supersede whatever the front office may have thought about keeping Charlie on. Yet a significant part of my “obviously they’re not going to do this” argument relied on the notion that, as the president of Team Vibes, Charlie was liked and respected and wanted by the guys in the room in a way that fans didn’t — and couldn’t — necessarily see. Based on what we’ve heard since I think that was true for some players, but obviously not true for many as well.
Some of my failure to see this coming was also from not seeing Ross Atkins being as ruthless as he was here. Fair point to him on that, I suppose. I suggested in my prior piece that firing Charlie would be “classless” so soon after the Budzinski tragedy — Charlie being someone who, from deeply personal experience, knows the agony a parent must feel over the possible death of a child, and may have been more affected than most by his colleague’s loss — and I don’t necessarily take that back, but the reality is that it’s a cruel industry that stops for no one. I can understand it being a line Atkins may have felt he had to consider crossing, especially if not making a change was something he felt was weighing on his own credibility in the room. And that may have been something was already at stake for reasons having nothing to do with the manager. Roster construction and the inability to bring in reinforcements so far are a glaring issue here, and let’s not forget that one of the lowest points of Alex Anthopoulos’s tenure as Blue Jays GM was after the 2014 trade deadline, when the team didn’t make a single move, causing no small amount of unrest in the clubhouse, some of which became quite public.
The more I’ve thought about it, the more I think that credibility in the room is the main thread that runs through this decision. You can’t make something like this about only one or two things, but Vladimir Guerrero’s reaction to the bench choosing to review a play at first base during the game against the Phillies back on Tuesday, after he’d told them not to, did not speak to there being a lot of faith in the way things were being run.
Bo Bichette gave me the same sense when he told reporters, “The front office has made their decision on what they thought was necessary. I don't disagree.”
On this subject, it’s fascinating to read some of the things written and said about Montoyo back before he’d managed a game for the Jays. A 2018 profile from Sportsnet’s Arden Zwelling goes through Charlie’s minor league days, both as a player and as a manager, and paints a picture of a guy who would be unrecognizable based on Jays fans’ perceptions of him today.
“Charlie was super hard-working, super hard-nosed. He’d challenge you. He expected you to play a certain way,” former Rays outfielder Justin Ruggiano is quoted as saying. “He’d jump your butt for not hustling a groundball. Even if it’s a groundball to the pitcher. If you dog it and disrespect the jersey, he’s pulling you out of the game right then and there. It could be the last week of the season, you’re exhausted — it didn’t matter. He always expected the same thing. I’m putting you in the lineup, you need to give me 100 per cent.”
“No one was spared” in Montoyo’s more combative early days, writes Arden, as he relayed stories of an undrafted catcher called up to Triple-A as an emergency replacement facing Charlie’s wrath after “a slew of minor mistakes.”
“I could tell when I first walked in that clubhouse — it was Charlie’s team,” explained the catcher, Craig Albernaz. “Whatever happened on that field or in that clubhouse was what Charlie wanted. And all the players had the utmost respect for him. You could see that right away. Everyone bought in.”
The piece also includes the tale of a nose-to-nose argument with his pitching coach over bullpen deployment and who really was in control, and Ruggiano saying he lost count of how many times he was benched.
Arden adds:
Montoyo was stern, sure. But another reading — the one most have of his style — is that he was honest, direct, and genuine. Players appreciated knowing where they stood, and recognized Montoyo’s sincere desire to help them improve and achieve their goals. “He’d get into you, but you always knew he had your best interests in mind,” Ruggiano says. “We’ve all had a lot of managers throughout our careers. And some of them, you’re not really sure where their heart is. With Charlie, if he was benching you because you didn’t hustle, he was doing it to prepare you for the next step. It’s just not until you get to the next step that you realize how grateful you are for what he did.”
I think a lot Jays fans would have liked to see more of that side of Montoyo during his time here. Perhaps his players would have, too.
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Per the Toronto Star’s Mike Wilner, closer Jordan Romano praised the hiring Schneider in a way that jumped out at me. “I’m comfortable going into his office, talking about whatever issues I’m having, or I think the team’s having,” Romano said. He later added that Schneider “keeps it really light, but he knows when to get into you when he sees the effort’s not there, so that’s what I’m excited to see up here.”
These could be completely innocuous statements of the kind that you’d expect about a new manager coming in, but they might also hint at what certain players felt they weren’t getting under Montoyo’s leadership.
Then there’s this, by way of Mike’s fellow Star writer, Gregor Chisholm:
“A player recently approached Star colleague Mike Wilner to ask whether Montoyo had been ripping his pitching staff to the media. Privately, another expressed frustration that Montoyo hadn’t addressed the team when things got tough during the recent 1-6 road trip. Publicly, pitcher Kevin Gausman questioned his team’s approach to defensive shifts.”
Earlier in the season, George Springer was also rather lukewarm on the outfield shifting, telling MLB.com’s David Adler, “I’ve personally just come to the conclusion of, whether it’s us or somebody [else], it’s going to happen. There’s no sense in trying to figure out why you’re going to do it. Just go stand where they want you stand, and if it works, it works. And if it doesn’t, it doesn’t.”
That is not exactly the level of buy-in that you’d think the front office would want to see. Or that the minor league version of Montoyo would have accepted.
Thing is, you don’t exactly get the sense that Montoyo was as fully bought in as he could have been either. At least not until he was told to be.
“Before we do it, [the front office has to] come here and explain to me why we're doing it,” he told Adler. “We don't do it just to do it. If they have a good explanation why we're doing it, then I'm good with it. And the times we've done it, it's been a good explanation. … There's numbers that say why we're doing it, and so far, we're doing it because I agree with it.”
We all watched as Charlie’s tactics “evolved” over the years, and the presumption was less that he suddenly got wise to the deficiencies of “small ball” after a lifetime in the game, and more that these things were impressed upon him. It had always been assumed that the front office demanded a very loud voice in the “collaborative” decision-making process, and that part of the reason Charlie had been plucked from virtual obscurity and given one of just 30 big league managerial jobs was precisely because he didn’t have the leverage to say no to those kinds of things.
“As a leader he made everything fun to come to the ballpark every single day,” reminisced Cavan Biggio in Wilner’s piece about his time playing for Schneider. “It was nice to have, from a leader aspect, to encourage things like that and to make sure we got our work in and make sure we had fun playing the game. The number one goal was to win the game. That was always the most important thing that was expressed from him and from our whole team.”
I certainly couldn’t say that Biggio here is implying that he thought, as many fans certainly did at times, Charlie’s number one goal wasn’t necessarily winning every game. Fans thought this about Charlie because of things he was clearly hired to do and to be — because of his eternal optimism and unwillingness (until this season) to scream and shout at umpires from the bench, and because of things like the frequent days off given to top players. I don’t for a second believe that the latter was anything Charlie pushed for, nor do I believe the players wouldn’t have completely understood this. But maybe from a player’s perspective the lack of pushback mattered more than we realized. Or lack of ability to push back.
In Gregor’s piece he quotes George Springer as saying that “It’s always a players’ locker room,” when asked if the team had started tuning out Montoyo.
“The players are the ones in the locker room, you know,” he said. “It’s up to us to have fun. Our clubhouse is fine. I love each and every guy that’s in our clubhouse. I’ve had no issues like that.”
“It’s up to us to have fun” is a line that feels telling, given that Charlie’s job was somewhat depicted as being more about atmosphere than tactics.
These, of course, are just guesses, and my track record on guesses isn’t so hot at the moment, but I can certainly envision a scenario where Charlie was caught between a rock and a hard place — where the guy he had been, and the guy he had been hired to be, wasn’t what the team needed him to be, and he didn’t know how to get out of that. Or didn’t recognize that he needed to. Or how quickly.
“I think when a manager comes and talks, they think he's panicking,” Montoyo told reporters, including Shi Davidi of Sportsnet, regarding the players-only meeting held by the team in Seattle a week ago. Based on the grumblings about the lack of communication from him during that skid, Charlie doesn’t seem to have read the room very well on that one. And, ultimately, being able to read the room is a manager’s number one job.
In other words, I don’t think this was so much about Charlie’s inability to get the best out of his players, mental mistakes, lack of victories, accountability, or anything really like that.
Another factor in this is John Schneider. The Jays have smartly put the “interim” tag on him for now, giving them time to evaluate how the rest of the season goes, but don’t sleep on the fact that he is a commodity of sorts. When Joe Girardi was fired by the Phillies in early June, Britt Ghiroli of the Athletic looked at several possible candidates to replace him and included this tidbit:
Other intriguing potential first-time names who may not get a look for this job but whose stock is rising around the game include Red Sox coaches Will Venable and Ramon Vazquez, the latter whom Dombrowski would know from his time in Boston, Tigers bench coach George Lombard and Blue Jays bench coach John Schneider.
Fans have long viewed Schneider as a manager-in-waiting because of the way the Jays organization had continually promoted him along with its core prospects. In 2017 he managed Dunedin to the Florida State League championship, leading a group that at times included Guerrero, Bichette, Biggio, Romano, Lourdes Gurriel Jr., Danny Jansen, and others. He repeated the championship feat with much of the same group at New Hampshire in 2018, winning Eastern League Manager of the Year in the process.
After that season many wondered if Schneider would get consideration for the Jays’ then-vacant managerial post, which of course ended up going to Montoyo. That always seemed a little bit too much too soon, especially for a guy who had never played or coached in the big leagues — potentially a matter of credibility when having to work with veteran players. But now, with three-and-a-half years on a big league staff under his belt that would seem to matter much less.
I always scoffed a little bit at this stuff, but if the Jays weren't always grooming Schneider to be an option to eventually take over when the roster needed more of a win-now voice, they sure as hell managed to do it pretty much perfectly anyway. What a coincidence! The fact that other teams were taking notice meant that the Jays were potentially going to be faced with a choice between Montoyo and Schneider at some point in the near future anyway, and though they probably could have muddled through with Charlie, picked up some reinforcements at the trade deadline, and been just about as fine as they will end up being with this change, the lever was there to be pulled, the players were taking it upon themselves to try to “change the vibe” (as Shi rather perfectly put it at the time), and getting any kind of a spark out of it certainly couldn’t hurt.
It also can’t hurt that we’re talking about this — or we were, before I took several days too long to get this damn piece out! — instead of roster construction or the lack of trades. It can’t hurt that, at least for a certain segment of fans, there’s at least a little bit more reason for optimism right now. Or that, for some players, they might in for a little more of a kick in the ass — something I know I could have used during the several days too long that it took me to get this damn piece out!
Hopefully that’s a kick that mostly comes from themselves, because despite talking around it in any number of ways here, it must be emphasized that their underperformance is the reason why they are where they are. The tactics aren’t going to change a whole lot — though Schneider’s rising stock maybe gives him more leeway when it comes to autonomy. The days off aren’t going away. The home run jacket remains to taunt every red ass out there who thinks what these guys need is a tyrant. All they’ve really done is try to change the vibe.
And when there just so happens to be a guy walking around as the embodiment of good vibes, I suppose it should have been easier to see how tempting it must have been to simply flip that switch.
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It may be just the way the stories were written, but one thing that has been notable by its absence to me was the usually stock quote from a player saying 'this is on us not doing our jobs well enough, we let the manager down'. Maybe that was just too boring a thing for anyone to put in their piece, but it's hard not to conclude from what is out there that it was not a happy ship.
Well...I’ll just join with the rest saying I, too, was on the same page about your last piece. I didn’t think he’d go, and I was content with that for all the reasons you outlined. What do you do, eh?
Apropos of this, I just got an email today from Sportsnet NOW offering the streaming package for $50 until the end of the season. Get this, it uses “fresh off firing manager Charlie Montoyo” like it’s fucking ad copy. Like they are fundraising off it. Jesus Christ.
Also they misspelled “off.” I’ll tweet you a pic of it because I don’t think I can post the screen cap here.