Postseason Managerial Report Card: John Schneider (Part 2: Pitching)

This postseason, FanGraphs is continuing its tradition of writing report cards for the on-field decisions made by playoff managers. Excluding the managers who lost in the best-of-three Wild Card Series, we cover every round of the playoffs for all eight managers. It’s detailed enough that I’ve begun enlisting some help. So far this year, I have graded the efforts of A.J. Hinch, Aaron Boone, Craig Counsell, Rob Thomson, and Dan Wilson. Dan Szymborski scrutinized Pat Murphy’s performance. Yesterday and today, I’m taking a look at John Schneider. The Blue Jays played enough games that we decided to split his report into two. Michael Baumann will follow with a review of Dave Roberts. It takes a village to get the kind of in-depth coverage we aspire to provide you.

Our goal is to evaluate each manager in terms of process, not results. If you bring in your best pitcher to face their best hitter in a huge spot, that’s a good decision regardless of the outcome. Try a triple steal with the bases loaded only to have the other team make four throwing errors to score three runs? I’m probably going to call that a blunder even though it worked out. Managers do plenty of other things — getting team buy-in for new strategies or unconventional bullpen usage behind closed doors is a skill I find particularly valuable — but as I have no insight into how that’s accomplished or how each manager differs, I can’t exactly assign grades for it.

I’m also purposefully avoiding vague qualitative concerns like “trusting your veterans because they’ve been there before.” Playoff coverage lovingly focuses on clutch plays by proven performers, but guys like Trey Yesavage and Addison Barger were also excellent this October. Forget trusting your veterans; the playoffs are about trusting your best players. George Springer is important because he’s great, not because of the number of playoff series he’s appeared in. There’s nothing inherently good about having been around a long time; when I’m evaluating decisions, “but he’s a veteran” just doesn’t enter my thought process.

I’m always looking for new analytical wrinkles in critiquing managerial decisions. For instance, I’ve increasingly come to view pitching decisions as a trade-off between protecting your best relievers from overexposure and minimizing your starters’ weakest matchups, which means that I’m grading managers on multiple axes in every game. I think there’s almost no pitching decision that’s a true no-brainer these days; there are just too many competing priorities to make anything totally obvious. That means I’m going to be less certain in my evaluation of pitching than of hitting, but I’ll try to make my confidence level clear in each case. I tackled the offensive portion of Schneider’s managing yesterday, so now it’s time for the pitching part of his report card. Let’s get to it, shall we?

Pitching: D+
If you thought Schneider was peripatetic on the hitting side, wait until you read this next 4,000 words or so. The Blue Jays came into October with two starters they trusted in Kevin Gausman and Trey Yesavage, two starters they felt OK about in Shane Bieber and Max Scherzer, and a bullpen that was one of the weakest parts of the team all year despite several deadline acquisitions. Schneider’s biggest puzzle was going to be how to piece together as many innings as possible from the pitchers in his circle of trust.

To lead off the ALDS, Gausman went until he got into big trouble. The biggest trouble imaginable, in fact: bases loaded, nobody out, Aaron Judge at the plate. Gausman won that matchup. He stayed in for two straight lefties — Cody Bellinger and Ben Rice — because the Jays bullpen had a shortage of capable lefty relievers, and Gausman’s splitter makes him excellent without the platoon advantage. After Gausman had faced three very good hitters with the bases loaded and retired two of them (Bellinger notched an RBI walk), Schneider pulled him for Louis Varland with Giancarlo Stanton due up.

I suppose I get the idea, but one really confusing part here is that the Yankees were heading into another pocket of lefties. That’s supposed to be Gausman’s domain, but Schneider went to Varland anyway. And if you think that Varland is a superior option to Gausman against Stanton, a good enough one that you’re willing to stomach some bad matchups later, why not use Varland against Judge? I ran these moves back and forth in my head for a while, and I still can’t make them line up together. I think the reason is that Stanton has a good career line against Gausman, but that doesn’t quite add up when you consider that’s not a large sample, and Judge owns Gausman even more. If Schneider didn’t want Gausman to face Stanton, then why did he face Judge? I’m not certain what decision I would have made in Schneider’s shoes – I’d probably err on the side of overusing Gausman, despite the success the two right-handed Yankee sluggers have had against him – but I am quite sure that I would have done something different than what he chose.

In any case, that put Toronto’s bullpen in a tough spot, with a ton of innings to cover against a good team in the first game of the playoffs. It didn’t matter, though; the Jays blew the game open in the seventh inning, allowing Schneider to use whomever he wanted. But Schneider wanted his guys! It was 10-1 to start the ninth inning, yet he still brought in closer Jeff Hoffman to face Stanton and Jazz Chisholm Jr.. Um, what?

Luckily, Hoffman wasn’t needed the next day, because the Toronto offense again ended the game early, pushing out to a 12-0 lead after five innings. Yesavage also flat out dominated; he went twice through the order and struck out 11 Yankees. He was clearly on an 18-batters-and-out plan, because he departed promptly after retiring the nine-hole hitter, and the Jays went to a string of their lowest-leverage options after that. If you’re wondering how bad the Toronto bullpen was, particularly in the dregs, consider this: The Blue Jays deployed four pitchers to cover the sixth and seventh innings after Yesavage left with one out in the sixth. Those four pitchers allowed 10 hits out of the 16 batters they faced, and suddenly it was 13-7. Schneider had to go back up the leverage hierarchy, to Mason Fluharty, Varland, and Seranthony Domínguez. That trio finished the game uneventfully, but Schneider’s trust in the mop-up squad had further eroded.

Bieber didn’t have his best stuff in the potential Game 3 clincher. That’s a euphemism, honestly; he was bad. He struck out only two, didn’t miss many bats, and despite being staked to a 6-1 lead, he didn’t survive the third inning. This was one of those “even the outs are loud” situations, too; four of the first five Yankee batters in the third inning hit the ball 100 mph or harder, and the only guy who didn’t laced a line drive single. Oh yeah – the Jays had already announced that the next day was going to be a bullpen game, too, so getting some sort of length out of Bieber was important. Alas, it didn’t happen.

After a brief, unsuccessful cameo by Fluharty in the fourth, Varland entered to face Judge. He promptly gave up a game-tying, three-run homer. Man, Judge is pretty good, and this was an absurd feat. Varland’s pitch was 99.7 mph and 1.2 feet off the plate inside; no player in the pitch tracking era had ever gone deep on a pitch that fast and that far inside. Allowing a home run to Judge on a good pitch? Sometimes that’ll happen. But then Varland got tagged for another dinger the next inning, by Chisholm, which put the Yankees in front. It was still only the fifth, but Schneider had to use his less-trusted guys just to make the math work. Braydon Fisher, Brendon Little, Yariel Rodríguez, and Tommy Nance followed, and Schneider got started on another trend he kept doing all postseason by intentionally walking Judge with the bases empty. Judge scored on a sacrifice fly two batters later to put the game away, and I really don’t like intentionally walking a guy with the bases empty when you’re trailing like that. You can read more on this in the section on the Mariners, because trust me, there were more of these, and I ran the math in a separate article there. I thought it was even a little worse here, for the record.

Varland drew the start the next day, his fourth straight appearance. Schneider had a great game plan for the first trip through the order, using Fluharty against a pocket of lefties at the bottom of the New York lineup and then rotating through his high-leverage arms whenever Judge batted. The Jays might have had an unreliable bullpen, but they had just enough lefties, and the Yankees had enough lefty hitters, that they were able to continue in that fashion for quite a while, including another bases-empty IBB of Judge in the sixth. This one almost cost them, because it left them with a low-leverage righty (Rodríguez) against Chisholm with the tying run in scoring position, but Chisholm grounded out. Hoffman got the final outs to close out the series in a well-managed bullpen game.

The Jays made two major roster changes for the ALCS, adding Scherzer and Chris Bassitt in place of two low-leverage relievers. Scherzer was there as a fourth starter, because another bullpen game wasn’t in the cards. Bassitt, returning from an IL stint, profiled as a multi-inning reliever. Those two gave Schneider much more flexibility in his bullpen usage. He didn’t need it in Game 1, though; despite facing Bryce Miller on short rest, the Toronto offense laid a rare egg. Schneider used all of his top guys trying to keep the game within reach, and for my money he used them all perfectly, but the runs never came.

Game 2 was mostly a wash. When Yesavage and Varland combined to surrender six runs across the first five innings, the game looked nearly over. A few more runs against the midsection of the bullpen, and it was mop-up time, but Schneider had a revelation: Bassitt looked amazing in relief. He didn’t allow a runner to reach, struck out two of the five batters he faced, and added multiple miles an hour to his offerings.

In Game 3, Schneider yet again didn’t have much to do. This time, the Jays were on the right side of a lopsided score, 12-2 through six. Bieber went six strong and turned the ball over to the bullpen with an unassailable lead, so Schneider used Fisher and Rodríguez, the last two relievers on the roster, to cover an inning apiece. Then, strangely, he used Fluharty for a platoon advantage in the ninth, which just feels like a waste to me. Rodríguez couldn’t cover another inning? Fluharty came into a lot of games in key situations; I don’t like using him here when the outcome wasn’t in question.

Game 4 was all about the offense again. The Blue Jays scored five quick runs to get way ahead, letting Schneider ride Scherzer much longer than expected. He lasted 22 batters and 87 pitches, doing his part to get his reliever teammates some rest. Amusingly, Fluharty was the first out of the pen after closing things down the night before, and he gave up a walk and a hit to the first two batters he faced. It was the third game out of four in which he’d faced Eugenio Suárez, a righty, and it would have been the third game out of four against the lefty-hitting Josh Naylor if not for a substitution the night before. In any case, familiarity did Fluharty no favors, as Suárez lined an RBI single to right to make it a 5-2 game. Fortunately for Toronto, Fluharty got out of the inning on that play anyway because Naylor was thrown out trying to advance to third. Even so, Schneider had seen enough of Fluharty; the manager replaced the left-hander with the righty Varland to start the seventh, even though the three Mariners due up bat left-handed.

The Blue Jays added three insurance runs in the next two innings to push their lead to 8-2. But Schneider didn’t care; he brought in Hoffman to pitch the eighth against the top of the Seattle order anyway, despite the six-run lead. Why? I don’t entirely understand. Then Domínguez got the bottom of the ninth, which also feels wasteful. Schneider might just like sending his guys into the game if they warm up, or he might just like getting them work; this wasn’t the first time he deployed his closer in a game that was already decided, and it wasn’t the last either.

Why do I keep harping on Schneider using his best relievers in spots that don’t really matter? Because the next day, a truly big spot came up: one-run lead, Cal Raleigh batting, bottom of the eighth inning. This is where you want your best guys pitching. But Hoffman didn’t enter, even though we’d seen him in the eighth inning against Raleigh the night before. Instead, it was Brendon Little, and Little got rocked. He gave up a game-tying homer to Raleigh, walked the next two batters, and then departed in favor of Domínguez. Domínguez wasn’t sharp, what with having pitched the night before and all, and he hit the first batter he faced before giving up a grand slam. Using your closer doesn’t automatically mean you’ll escape the inning unscathed, but if you’re sending Hoffman into a six-run game, you should also be sending him into a one-run game.

When the series shifted back to Toronto for Game 6, Schneider was determined to correct his mistake. This time, the Jays took a 5-0 lead early. After limiting Yesavage to 18 batters earlier in the playoffs, Schneider tried to extend him a third time through the lineup. I thought that was a reasonable decision given the team’s bullpen difficulties, but it backfired to the tune of a solo shot and a single that led to another run, cutting the lead to 5-2. Next came Varland, and now the Jays were up 6-2 with only two innings left to cover. Schneider didn’t take any chances; even though there was a decisive game the next day, he put Hoffman out there for a two-inning save. It took 35 pitches, but Hoffman accomplished the task.

Bieber looked incredibly shaky to open Game 7, and I liked how quickly Schneider gave him the hook. Varland entered – his 10th appearance in 11 games, what a monster – and gave up a homer to Raleigh almost immediately. Amazingly, this wasn’t a case of Raleigh getting too familiar with Varland over a long series; it was the first time the two of them had matched up, in fact. Schneider might go to Varland at every opportunity, but he took pains to mix up his assignments.

The reason Schneider was comfortable with a quick call to the bullpen is that he had a number of starting pitchers available to round out his normal complement. All three high-leverage relievers – Varland, Domínguez, and Hoffman – pitched. Bassitt, who had strangely been mothballed after his sharp appearance early in the series, delivered a clean inning. Gausman chipped in an inning of his own on his throw day. That accounted for all nine innings, and the four guys who followed Varland each were perfect, sending the Jays to the World Series. The only hiccup was another bases-empty intentional walk, but the particulars of this one lined up better than the ones against Judge. I wrote about it here.

OK, phew! We’ve made it through the first two rounds. All that remains is the World Series, another seven-game shootout against a powerful offense. As happened many times in these playoffs, the Toronto lineup started the series by making Schneider’s job easy. A nine-run sixth inning turned this game into garbage time quickly, letting him ease off the gas. He actually did it this time, too; after the game was no longer in doubt, Fisher, Bassitt, and Eric Lauer handled the last three innings. I’m not wild about using Bassitt there; he’s too good relative to the other low-leverage arms in the bullpen. Why waste him in a blowout, especially when you consider he was coming back from injury? Mostly, though, things just went Toronto’s way so decisively that there weren’t many tough choices.

Game 2 presented the opposite puzzle. Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Gausman were both incredibly sharp, but Gausman surrendered two solo shots when Schneider tried to push him through the Los Angeles order a third time. I thought it was a reasonable decision, particularly given that Toronto was so short on quality lefty relievers for the Freddie Freeman/Max Muncy section of the lineup, but it just happened to work out poorly. Varland relieved him and got into a jam of his own — bases loaded with one out — right away. Here, I love that Schneider tried to use Hoffman to stem the tide. Yes, the Jays were down by two, but they had six outs left to play with, and then they were off the next day. The good relievers hadn’t pitched in Game 1, so why not see if you can stop the bleeding and then get back in the game? But Hoffman couldn’t stop the Dodgers, allowing two of the inherited runners to score, and in any case Yamamoto threw a complete game and allowed only one run. Hey, can’t win ‘em all.

Game 3 probably took a year off of Schneider’s life. No one wants to manage an 18-inning game, much less in the World Series. But with the exception of some intentional walks, which I’ll talk about later, I thought Schneider did a very good job handling the pitching staff. He was on the 18-and-out plan for Scherzer, who gave up two home runs and definitely exited the game at the right time. Fluharty got beaten by Shohei Ohtani and Freeman – yeah, that’ll happen sometimes – but Schneider stuck with the script, turning it over to Varland and then Domínguez in a tight 5-4 game. Domínguez had a mental or command lapse and poured in a pipe shot fastball to start off Ohtani. Just like that, the game was tied and Schneider had to scramble.

The first part of his pivot was Bassitt for the eighth – I think using Hoffman for a two-inning save was the initial plan before the Ohtani home run. Bassitt looked sharp, but surprisingly, Schneider limited him to an inning. The top of the order was due up in the ninth, and not just anyone can face Ohtani. What’s that, you say? Schneider walked Ohtani every time he batted from here on out? Oh, uh… Yeah, I probably would have stuck with Bassitt for a little longer then. I promise, more on the walks at the end of this game.

Hoffman got his two innings in after all, beginning with the ninth. The stupid game wouldn’t end though. Fisher followed, and then Lauer, a starter by trade, came in for the long haul. He threw 4 2/3 death-defying innings, allowing six baserunners and striking out only two, but keeping the Dodgers down anyway. This was real gut-check stuff, a masterful performance by Lauer. I also credit Schneider for letting him go as long as he could. Little came in after Lauer was well and truly gassed, and Bieber was even getting ready to appear next, but before that came to pass, Freeman led off the bottom of the 18th with a walk-off homer.

About those intentional walks: I wrote about them here. I disliked them greatly and thought that Schneider’s flat refusal to face Ohtani cost the Blue Jays by bringing up the Dodgers’ best hitters over and over again. I’m willing to believe that my projection-based methodology doesn’t perfectly capture how hot Ohtani was this particular night – but that would be a tiny adjustment. I’m going to try to quantify it a bit more in the offseason, but Schneider’s moves cost the Dodgers something like 13 percentage points of win probability. Even if I turn Ohtani into peak Babe Ruth, the numbers don’t add up. It’s not a matter of how well Ohtani was seeing the ball; it’s just a matter of putting baserunners on in a tie game. It feels like a gimmick. There’s no way that it could be right to walk three different players intentionally with the bases empty in a single postseason. Schneider just likes doing it, the same way that he likes bunting or going to Hoffman with a big lead.

The silver lining of this exhausting marathon was that the next day’s plans wrote themselves. First, Bieber for as long as he could go – that turned out to be 5 1/3 innings — and then Fluharty to get Muncy and escape a jam. The Jays were up 6-1 by this point, so Bassitt entered to provide bulk innings. Like I said, I probably would have used Bassitt for longer the night before, but contingent on what transpired in reality, this was a great way to make the most of his rested status. Varland got the ninth, because he pitches in every game and Bassitt was understandably tired after back-to-back appearances.

Game 5, the last one in Los Angeles, showed Schneider at his best. The Jays got an absolutely dominant performance out of Yesavage, 12 strikeouts in seven strong innings. With a still-tired bullpen, Schneider gave Yesavage rope, and he kept making the most of it. A 1-2-3 sixth against Ohtani, Will Smith, and Mookie Betts bought him a chance to start the seventh, and when the Blue Jays offense pushed the lead to 5-1, Yesavage got to pitch the entire inning. Then it was Domínguez and Hoffman for the last two innings. I normally wouldn’t like using your two best bullpen arms against the opponents’ best players in such a low-leverage spot, but the other relievers were all gassed too, the next day was an off day, and it was one of the final three games of the year. This seems like the best possible time to give your closer a five-run “save” opportunity.

Game 6 finally featured an intentional walk I’m on board with. With two outs, Ohtani batted in the top of the third in a scoreless tie. There was a runner on second with first base open, so Schneider walked Ohtani, a move I’d make 100% of the time. Smith, Freeman, and Betts followed up by reaching consecutively, giving the Dodgers a 3-0 lead they’d never relinquish. Bad outcome, but good process in my opinion. The Dodgers have a ton of stars, and sometimes those guys are going to get hits. It was still a smart IBB.

Interestingly, Schneider seemed to lose faith in the tactic after that one. When Ohtani batted with one out and none on in the fifth, a spot in which Schneider had frequently called for an intentional walk earlier in the playoffs, Gausman faced him and retired him. Ohtani batted again with no one on and one out in the eighth; Fluharty entered and Ohtani doubled, though the Dodgers didn’t score. The rest of the bullpen management went basically as expected, and Schneider even saved Hoffman for Game 7 by using Bassitt to clean up in the ninth. I liked that move, too.

It was Scherzer’s turn to start Game 7, and it was also all hands on deck. That meant 18 batters and a firm handshake for Scherzer, and in a sign that it was absolutely the right move, even Mad Max didn’t argue with his removal. Varland came in against Ohtani, a move that I absolutely loved, because Schneider had overexposed Fluharty against Ohtani and didn’t want to give him more of the same look. Schneider was consistently excellent when it came to mixing up batter/pitcher matchups, in fact, the best I saw out of every manager I reviewed this postseason.

I guess I should point out an exception to prove the rule. The next pitcher into the game after Varland was Bassitt. I don’t love using a converted starter returning from injury on back-to-back days as a Plan A. It’s one thing to do it when you have to because of an 18-inning game, and another entirely to plan on it. Even worse, Bassitt faced all the batters he had the previous night: Muncy, Tommy Edman, and Enrique Hernández. They accounted for two singles and a sacrifice fly. That’s hardly predestined – sometimes you face the same guy twice and he strikes out both times — but for a manager who mostly protected his guys from overexposure, this was a rare misstep.

The rest of Schneider’s plan was solid; it just didn’t survive contact with the enemy. He called on Yesavage to get five outs; the rookie did, but he also surrendered a solo shot to Muncy that made it a one-run game. A well-rested Hoffman came in to try for a four-out save to secure the Jays their first World Series in 32 years. Instead, he gave up a game-tying blast to Miguel Rojas, of all people. Notably, Schneider didn’t intentionally walk Ohtani after that, and Hoffman retired him. But the Jays stopped scoring, and after Bieber gave up a homer to Smith in the 11th, the Dodgers were back-to-back champions.

Even though it was a magical playoff run for the Blue Jays, I’m sure that fans feel frustrated. The Jays played 18 games, and by my count, they went 8-2 in games where one team clearly outplayed the other. They went 2-6 in close games, including 0-3 in the World Series. Fair or not, Schneider is going to take some of the blame for that, and honestly, I think that’s fair.

Not every move he made was a head-scratcher. In fact, I liked a lot of Schneider’s decisions. He has a great sense of how much leash to give his starters. He worked platoon matchups without overtaxing his preferred lefty, used his pitchers’ splitters to their best advantage, and did all of that without playing into bad batter/pitcher matchups more than he needed to. He also made a series of moves I didn’t like. He was too aggressive with his closer, he never met an intentional walk he didn’t like, and he just generally had to be doing something at all times.

That’s a unified criticism across both his pitching and hitting decisions. I actually think that Schneider has a good plan for tons of different eventualities, which puts him ahead of many of the managers I’ve graded in recent years. I just didn’t like the need to affect the game from the dugout. Bunts and intentional walks are best used extremely rarely. Giving up free outs or free baserunners is so clearly bad that you should think twice or even three times before calling for them. I don’t think Schneider had the requisite caution there. If the Jays go on another run like this, I’d be surprised to see either tactic feature so heavily; I thought they contributed to some of the tough losses and almost never were the difference in the big wins.