Something has shifted in the Blue Jays' clubhouse

TORONTO -- It was whispered all spring, as if speaking it out loud would jinx the whole thing.

The Blue Jays had a good feeling, which began to drip out slowly. The odd player would mention a tighter clubhouse, maybe a stronger relationship with the coaching staff. That’s the same chorus we all sing each spring, though, on cool Dunedin mornings before anything has gone wrong.

Then came the coaches. One after another, members of the Blue Jays' staff started hinting at the same things. Quietly, they had a really good feeling about this team, but again, they didn’t want it plastered on a billboard. This part goes beyond just avoiding a jinx.

As we’ve heard players speak more openly about this through April, including Chris Bassitt after a recent win in Toronto when he praised the front office and manager John Schneider, they’ve gone up to a certain line but never crossed over it. A big league clubhouse is a sacred space for those who earn it. Those carpeted floors are holy ground. Some things stay in the clubhouse -- almost everything does, frankly -- but at this point, it’s clear that something significant has shifted in this organization.

“There’s always an undertow of every team,” Schneider said Saturday. “I’ve learned in real time that you have to manage that. There are times where it can really stir up some [stuff] and pull people out with it. There’s times where it can just be there and go away. This group, along with the staff, is doing a good job at making sure it just stays there and goes away.”

Even here, Schneider toes that line perfectly, his underwater analogy revealing something but not everything.

Players drive the culture and the clubhouse, but if the staff isn’t on the same page, it all falls apart. That starts at the top with Schneider, who feels like he’s finally found the groove in this job that he’d spent his first couple of seasons searching for.

If players don’t trust their manager -- fully and completely -- things begin to splinter and fracture. All winter and spring, Schneider and his staff spoke about improving these relationships and making everything completely clear to their players, good or bad.

“It’s easy for me to sit here and talk to you about the type of player and what the expectations are,” Schneider said. “What I’ve gotten better at is making that more clear to the players and getting buy-in from them. I’m not saying it’s just me, it’s everyone coming to that spot together. Whether it’s taking Bowden [Francis] out after 77 pitches or, ‘Hey, here’s who we’re playing today and here’s where you’re hitting and why,’ I’m just trying to be totally up front with that.”

Part of this shift in the clubhouse, too, has been in the connective tissue. There’s a front office, a coaching staff and an analytics department all trying to come together and stick, but that’s rarely a simple thing. When Bassitt spoke earlier in the week, he mentioned that the organization had “changed some things up analytically.”

Players want information -- some more than others -- but they also want to feel free. A coach’s job -- whether that be Schneider, pitching coach Pete Walker or one of the Blue Jays’ hitting staff -- is to feed a player all of that fancy information in a way that works for them specifically. Then, their job is to push and empower them to still play with a sense of freedom.

“That’s the game within the game for every team in this league, all 30. I can say pretty confidently that we’ve arrived at a place where everyone’s opinion is heard,” Schneider said. “It’s not going to be cookie cutter every single night. It’s nice to have that freedom. I think some teams don’t have that freedom. It’s cool to watch things unfold now, and there’s a lot of different ways you can cut it every single night. I think I’ve been through enough, screwed up enough and done well enough to learn from things that have happened in the past, too.”

That last part might be the secret to all of this. More than ever before, Schneider is openly talking about the things he or the team has “screwed up” right alongside their successes. That’s a form of freedom, too.

There’s also some freedom in knowing it’s still April. Some of this is steeped in the optimism of spring, but it’s still palpable, and the whispers from those February days in Dunedin are getting a little louder.