Schneider's fiery ejection unable to spark Blue Jays' quiet bats

TORONTO -- The biggest cheer of the night came when manager John Schneider did what so many Blue Jays fans have wanted to do this week. He threw something and yelled.

Schneider was ejected in the fifth inning for arguing a balk call on starter Kevin Gausman, but this was about so much more than a balk. The Blue Jays, losers of six in a row after falling 4-1 to the Dodgers on Tuesday night at Rogers Centre, are searching for signs of life. This was Schneider’s attempt at a defibrillator.

“Felt kind of nice to get a little frustration out,” Schneider said, still calling it “definitely not a balk.”

As well-timed and well-received as it was, Toronto still couldn’t get off the ground. No matter how loudly Schneider yelled and no matter how many shades of red his face progressed through as he stood nose-to-nose with home-plate umpire Dan Merzel, it didn’t change the fact that Yoshinobu Yamamoto was pitching for Los Angeles.

Yamamoto haunts this team. In the 2025 World Series, Yamamoto was named MVP after he allowed just two runs over 17 2/3 innings. After tossing a complete game in Game 2, he threw six innings of one-run ball in Game 6 to keep the Dodgers alive, then came back the very next night to close out Game 7 with 2 2/3 more innings. It was one of the greatest World Series pitching performances we’ve ever seen.

Lately, though, it hasn’t taken one of the best pitchers on the planet to shut down the Blue Jays’ offense. It’s happened too often over the past week, including a sweep to the White Sox in Chicago. So much of the attention has been on Toronto’s pitching, given the stunning number of injuries which have piled up, and that will continue to be a constant story in the coming weeks. If there’s one place to point the blame for this recent skid, though, it’s the offense.

Over these six losses, the Blue Jays have scored just 11 runs. They’ve hit just two home runs, one from Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and the other from Andrés Giménez. Even Tuesday, when Toronto loaded the bases with no outs in the bottom of the seventh, the team couldn’t scrape another run across. Shallow fly ball, strikeout, shallow fly ball.

“The way out of this is that someone needs to get the big hit,” Schneider said. “There are opportunities out there. It’s just a matter of who’s it going to be? You never know who it’s going to be. It could happen early, it could happen late. Today, it was the seventh inning, bases loaded with nobody out. It will happen.”

This won’t get any easier without Alejandro Kirk, who’s gone for six weeks after undergoing left thumb surgery. George Springer is batting .159 with a .601 OPS. Vladdy is batting .237 with a .699 OPS. Addison Barger is on the IL with a left ankle sprain after a rough start at the plate, and Daulton Varsho is batting .171 with a .504 OPS. All of this will improve -- it absolutely will -- but there’s so much more urgency in 2026.

If this happened a year ago, amid the Blue Jays’ very modest expectations, it would be easier to shrug shoulders and look at the 151 games still to come. Everything feels heightened, though, after the World Series run. There’s frustration, because we saw in 2025 that the Blue Jays do an excellent job at shaking off losses, moving on to the next day and rediscovering their own game.

“That’s real. That’s something this group is good at,” Schneider said. “Our job is to remind them if needed, but we haven’t had to do that yet. They’re saying the right things, and I think their frame of mind is pretty good. You try to be deliberately consistent every single day. Stack wins, stack your routines, stack being productive. It’s a results-based business, and if it doesn’t happen tonight, you’ve got to turn the page to tomorrow and try to stack some positive things going forward. When it breaks, it breaks.”

The Blue Jays need a break, but the Dodgers are about to throw Shohei Ohtani at them in Wednesday’s finale. It doesn’t get any easier, but at some point soon, they need to stop making it harder on themselves.