‘We made a mistake,’ says Blue Jays’ boss Mark Shapiro. But they made a bunch — and no one in charge will pay
The organization failed or went backwards on multiple fronts this year, not just in the post-season, but the team’s slick-talking president sees it otherwise, writes Rosie DiManno.
You know how bodybuilders get all oiled up before flexing their muscles in a posing competition?
That’s what came to mind when Mark Shapiro addressed baseball correspondents on Thursday morning, more than a week after the Toronto Blue Jays were so ignominiously punted out of the post-season, back-to-back wild-card-game losses and adios muchachos.
Slicked, greased to the gills, too slippery to get your hands on, to pin in a place of reckoning.
The playoff slash line is nowhere near as pretty: One (1) run scored, a mess of mistakes on the basepaths and a cold-blooded in-game data-driven managerial decision that will go down in infamy — the yanking of Game 2 starter Jose Berrios, who was merely pitching the game of his life, in the fourth inning of a scoreless affair, a move that deflated the players, confounded the experts and infuriated the fans.
Shapiro, sitting in the posh seat alongside GM Ross Atkins at Target Field last Wednesday, acknowledged he was aware of that game-plan, manager John Schneider bringing in Yusei Kikuchi to get some of the left-handed Minnesota Twins out of there, aligning Toronto’s relievers for better matchups later in the game. Again, cleaving to analytic projections from the numbers-crunching cabal and ignoring what’s actually happening on the field. “But I didn’t know when it would happen. I found out at the same moment in time when John walked to the mound.”
À la Atkins, at his conclave with reporters last weekend, hanging it on Schneider, when there’s plenty of rope to go around. It isn’t even credible. And how will the three of them coexist now, with the tread marks across Schneider’s mug, particularly the general manager scapegoating the manager?
“There’s no awkwardness between the two,” Shapiro insisted, claiming there’s a “clear line of demarcation” for in-game decision-making. Besides, he’s just not into the blame game. “We’re not looking to say that John Schneider made a mistake or Ross made a mistake or who made the mistake. We made a mistake. It didn’t work … I’m more than confident in John Schneider’s ability to manage a Major League Baseball game and I’m more than confident in Ross’s ability to run a baseball operation.”