TORONTO – In 2018, he won the Eastern League pennant with the New Hampshire Fisher Cats and now in 2022 he has a chance to win the American League pennant with the Fisher Cats’ parent club.
On Wednesday, the Toronto Blue Jays announced that former New Hampshire Fisher Cats catcher and manager John Schneider will serve as interim Blue Jays manager for the remainder of the 2022 Major League Baseball season.
The move comes after the Blue Jays fired Charlie Montoya earlier in the day. In his fifth season with the Jays’ Montoya leaves with a 236-236 record that did not see Toronto climb higher than third place in the AL East. That third-place finish in 2020 was enough to make the playoffs, where they were eliminated by the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in the Wild Card Series. In 2021, the Blue Jays went 91-71 and missed the postseason by one game.
Montoya signed a contract extension this spring, but his team has under-performed, coming into Wednesday with a 46-42 record, including only two wins in Toronto’s last ten games.
Schneider complied a 76-62 record for the Fisher Cats in 2018, earning him the Eastern League Manager of the Year award that year and a coaching position in Toronto in 2019. He also led Toronto’s minor league affiliates in Vancouver and Dunedin into winning their respective league championships in 2011 and 2017, respectively.
The Princeton, N.J., native spent six seasons as a catcher in the Blue Jays organization, playing in 63 games with the Fisher Cats from 2006 to 2007.