Davis Schneider is a throwback. Not because he’s 5-foot-9, and fought his way through the minor leagues after signing for $50,000 as a 28th-round pick. Or because he has featured at three positions in his brief major league career, or because he hides half his face behind a bushy mustache twice the size of Tom Selleck’s.

We’re not throwing things back that far. Schneider is a throwback to about eight years ago, when the swing plane revolution was in full, um, swing. Back when the baseballs were juicier and fastballs had more sink, undersized infielders with strength and hit tool to burn were taught to uppercut, in contravention of 100 years of baseball orthodoxy. And thus stars were made out of Daniel Murphy, Ozzie Albies, and Schneider’s new Toronto teammate Justin Turner, among others.

Schneider was drafted in 2017, took two full years to make it out of rookie ball, had his first double-digit homer season as a pro in 2022, and only broke out last year. Schneider hit 29 home runs in 122 combined games in Triple-A and the majors, and emerged as a fan favorite in Toronto. Which you would expect, given that the Berlin, NJ, native got off to one of the hottest starts in major league history.

A look at Schneider’s career numbers paints a clear picture of a guy who yanks the ball hard, in the air, and to his pull side:

And he’s done this throughout the minor leagues, where only once (a 17-game stint at Low-A in 2019) did Schneider post a GB/FB ratio over 1.00. Never, in a professional stop of any length, has his pull rate dropped below 40%. It’s like he was built in a lab to hit like a guy from 2017.

In a manner of speaking, he was.

“I was always a pull hitter,” Schneider says. “I hated going the other way. I hated singles to right field. As a kid, growing up, you want to hit home runs. I always tried to do that from little league until high school — ironically enough, I never hit a home run to left field at my high school, but it’s a big park, like 340 feet to left, so it was kind of tough to get it out of there.”

I know Schneider’s high school ballpark quite well, in fact, because it was my high school ballpark. Schneider is the first player from my alma mater, Eastern Regional High School of Voorhees, NJ, to reach the big leagues. (Not that I used the ballpark much. Schneider was All-Conference in baseball; I was All-Conference in clarinet.)

Schneider was the Philadelphia Inquirer’s South Jersey Player of the Year as a senior, and while that region isn’t exactly South Florida or Atlanta in terms of baseball talent, it’s churned out a couple noteworthy players. Notable ballplayers not just from South Jersey but from Schneider’s (our) high school catchment area include Zac Gallen, Devin Smeltzer, and Pirates first-rounder Anthony Solometo, all of whom went to high school at Bishop Eustace, the local Catholic prep baseball powerhouse. (Eastern, in addition to being perhaps the only public high school in America where field hockey is the no. 1 sport, claims Kelly Ripa as its most famous alum.)

Gallen and Smeltzer followed the most common path for local baseball prospects: They went to college, and went down south to do so. Schneider says he felt like he had the talent to play in the SEC, but he committed to Rutgers with the intention of turning pro if his name was called anywhere in the draft. And it was for a reason most 18-year-olds would identify with all too readily.

“I didn’t want to go to school,” he says. “Money wasn’t really an issue for me — I signed for $50,000, and to me that was a lot of money. But I felt like as long as I got a shot, anything could happen.”

I asked Schneider a question I like to pose to ballplayers who had anything other than a fast track run from high school to the majors: What would you have done for a living if baseball hadn’t worked out? And it turns out Schneider’s motivation to avoid extra schooling is quite powerful. He said he wanted to be a firefighter, because it doesn’t require a degree.

Schneider’s hometown is a pretty typical middle class suburb. It’s got good pizza and the diner where I spent most of my early 20s; working some blue collar job there after chasing the pro baseball dream is hardly a nightmare scenario. Perhaps for that reason, Schneider is pretty self-aware about what it took to pull that dream off.

“I feel like it’s a lot of luck,” he says. “Obviously, there’s a lot of hard work involved in it. But life is all about luck, in my opinion. And I feel like I’ve been lucky so far.”

Schneider had a couple opportunities to play up his roots as a Day Three draft pick from an unfashionable scouting region, but he never took the bait. He acknowledged that higher picks tended to get more chances, but he tried to create opportunities for himself in the minors by always being a good teammate. Besides, as he said, he got his shot. He got his opportunity, even if it didn’t come with major press coverage and a seven-figure signing bonus, and is just making the most of it.

Which has made him a fan favorite on a team that’s got plenty of star power but has struggled for offense this season. Schneider has forced his way into the lineup at both left field and second base as the Blue Jays have navigated injuries, and he’s worked his way into the middle of the order as George Springer, Bo Bichette, and Alejandro Kirk have all posted an OPS under .600.

But Schneider has also come up big in big moments, most recently on April 2 in Houston, when he took Josh Hader deep to turn a 1-0 deficit into a 2-1 win. (You may remember this dinger from my article about Hader last week.)

I asked him how he dealt with the pressure of an at-bat in a tight game against an all-world closer.

“I was nervous. I’m always nervous coming up to the plate, no matter what the situation is,” Schneider says. “But it’s just a matter of game planning. If you’re game planning the right way, then you’re going to be more prepared in that situation… The nerves might still be high, but you’re going to be competent enough to be like, ‘OK, I’m prepared, I know what he’s going to do and what I’m trying to do.”

Schneider is only 64 games into his big league career; perhaps those nerves will calm down as time goes on. As it is, Tuesday was his first time playing in Citizens Bank Park, just 20 minutes (depending very heavily on traffic) from the high school field he couldn’t pull a ball out of. Schneider estimated that his cheering section (which, for the record, was audible from the press box) would have about 50 people (the group that stuck around after the game might’ve been three times that size), and that he’d received more text messages than he’d been able to answer.

If Schneider’s going to stick in Toronto’s lineup for future trips to Philadelphia, he might need to make adjustments. Natural as his swing might be, it’s suited for a period of baseball we’re evolving out of.

“It depends on the pitcher,” Schneider says. “If the guy has a good four-seamer up in the zone, you have to make sure you’re shooting the ball the other way low.” (The teenaged Schneider would no doubt be furious to learn what he grew up to become.) “Sometimes, getting that four-seamer up, it’s going to be tough to pull it in the air… But it’s the mindset of not getting beat on that pitch up, because that’s the best pitch.”

So far, it’s working for him; Schneider is in the 98th percentile for barrel rate and the 90th percentile for xISO, with a .367 OBP. If he hits like this, he’ll keep getting chances, and that’s all Schneider’s ever needed.

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