Into the Schneider-Verse

You already know the deal with the Blue Jays, so much so that I barely have to mention it. The good players on their team? They’re major league legacies. As kids, they were in major league clubhouses. There are cute pictures of them, chubby-cheeked, watching their famous parents win various accolades. Their major league success was hardly preordained, but let’s just say it didn’t come out of nowhere.

That lazy narrative had already sprung a few leaks, even before this year. Matt Chapman and George Springer don’t quite fit the bill. Kevin Gausman and Jordan Romano don’t either. Cavan Biggio isn’t even a starter. But there’s perhaps no better counter-example than Davis Schneider, the Jays’ newest star. Schneider flew so far under the radar that the metaphor doesn’t work; he was almost subterranean. He was a 28th-round draft pick in 2017, a round that doesn’t exist anymore. He didn’t reach Double-A until the end of the 2022 season. Now he’s the best hitter on the Jays, and in at least a few contrived ways that I’ll endeavor to show you in this article, he might be the best hitter of all time.

I know what you’re thinking. “Really, Ben? The best hitter of all time? He’s not even the best hitter on his own team right now.” To that I say, sure, you might think that. But that’s based on your perception of the future. If we limit our analysis to merely what has happened on the field, no Blue Jays hitter even approaches Schneider’s magnificence.

Are you a fan of batting average? Schneider’s .370 mark puts the rest of the Jays to shame (minimum 90 PA). Heck, it puts everyone else in the entirety of major league baseball to shame. You like Luis Arraez? I’m sure you do. He’s hitting .349 for the year. That’s an admirable number, and miles behind Schneider. He’s the undisputed batting average king of the majors this year — minimum 90 plate appearances.

Ah, but batting average is a notoriously misleading statistic. We all know that these days. What about useful statistics, like OBP or slugging percentage or wOBA? Heck, what about xwOBA, a fancy new-age statistic that will surely tell no lies about who’s good and who isn’t. Even Dan Szymborski, the zany dean of baseball projections, gave it a (partial) stamp of approval.

Well, guess what? Schneider leads Major League Baseball in on-base percentage. He’s nearly 100 points ahead of runner-up and noted good baseball player Ronald Acuña Jr. He leads the majors in slugging percentage, a whopping 150 points ahead of fellow phenom Shohei Ohtani. He’s first by more than 100 points of wOBA, and by roughly 75 points of wRC+. His xwOBA? Well, okay, it’s a piddling seventh (dead heat with Mookie Betts), but even the all-time greats have weaknesses sometimes.

It’s fairly settled that Schneider is having the best season of any Blue Jay this year. Even if you want to use longer-term counting statistics, he’s fifth among their hitters in WAR, and fifth is pretty good for someone who has yet to eclipse 100 plate appearances. I think we should set our goals higher. Is Schneider the best baseball player in the history of the sport? The answer is not as cut and dried as you might think.

Obviously, there are some very good baseball players. Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Ted Williams — I’ve heard of all of those guys, and you likely have, too. We can even do better than that with recent greats like Barry Bonds and Mike Trout; they, too, are excellent players. If nothing else, Schneider has less name recognition than those titans, so I assume I’ll have to bowl you over with evidence of his superiority.

My first argument is merely this: none of those exalted heroes has put together a batting line as good as Schneider’s. Heck, none has matched him in a single slash line statistic. No one would dispute that each is an excellent hitter, but it’s inarguably true that none have a career batting line as impressive as our valiant protagonist. Ruth has the second-best slugging percentage of all time, behind only Josh Gibson, and yet he’s more than one hundred points behind Schneider in that venerable statistic.

Ah, I can imagine you countering already. What a foolish conjecture I’m making. Those greats had to keep up their lofty hitting numbers through thick and thin, across many years in the majors. Schneider has only had to do it for 23 games. Surely, their feat is far more impressive than his. To that, I can’t offer much of a counter. But I can say this: how else are we supposed to compare him to them? He hasn’t yet played many years in the majors.

Fine, then. I suppose we’ll have to compare players based on their first 23 games, minimum 90 plate appearances. The future is unknowable. Schneider could do anything at all tomorrow or the next day. The earth could unexpectedly crash into the sun, making all of this pointless. Perhaps baseball will be outlawed by a misguided politician in pursuit of a bump in the polls. Rob Manfred could change the rules tomorrow such that an out can only be recorded after the first fielder to touch the ball does the macarena. None of these outcomes is particularly likely, but the point is that it’s unfair to judge someone based on what has not yet happened.

Instead, let’s just look at players based on the start of their careers. After all, Schneider has played in 23 games, so we can compare him to the universe of players 23 games into their career and at least see how he’s doing compared to them. And how he’s doing is first. No one has a better OPS than Schneider through 23 games, according to Stathead. And the list of people who came closest is a mixture of guys I’ve never heard of and actual factual great hitters:

What’s that? You don’t remember Mandy Brooks? That might be because he only played a year and change in the majors. If you exclude his first 23 games of pure hot lava, he hit .233/.287/.373 for his career. On the other hand, you probably have heard of Albert Pujols. After his initial explosion onto the scene, he hit .327/.420/.615 in the remainder of his first go-around with the Cardinals, an 11-year stretch wherein he accumulated 81.3 WAR.

What will happen next? Well, Depth Charts projects Schneider to be a slightly above-average hitter the rest of the way. He’s not exactly a scouting darling. Over at Baseball Prospectus, Patrick Dubuque dug into his start to see what their predictive hitting metrics think. If you listen to any of a menagerie of baseball experts, they’ll tell you to expect an average hitter going forward.

To that I say, have a little sense of adventure. I have a substantially less specific prediction for Schneider’s future. I think that his career will land somewhere between Mandy Brooks and Albert Pujols. That’s backed up by the data; 100% of hitters who started off as hot as Schneider have ended up with careers between those two. Every unlikely hero has to have an origin story. No one thought Pujols was going to be an all-time great, and then he was. But plenty of stories that look like they’re too good to be true turn out to be just that. That’s what’s great about baseball, though: we can just wait and see. The future is going to happen, at which point we can put it into context.

You might say that my projection is worthless. I’d reply that not everything needs a useful projection. How much fun is it to go through life never caring about what’s currently happening, only focusing on what is most likely to happen in the future? That sounds like a boring existence. Right now, Davis Schneider has the best hitting resume of all time through 23 games. That is incontrovertibly true. The rest? We’ll just have to wait and see.

Statistics in this article are current through games of Sunday, September 10.