It has been years since Gregg Zaun has been a Blue Jays commentator, but that didn’t stop the former catcher from speaking his mind about the team this week.
Zaun, who played for the franchise from 2004-2008 before later becoming an on-air analyst for Sportsnet, tore into team manager John Schneider, particularly his coddling of Vladimir Guerrero Jr., during a podcast appearance.
“You also have to have a guy at the helm that has some street cred, not just living on the fact that he’s been Vladdy’s caddie since the minor leagues,” Zaun said on The Raw Mike Richards Show over the weekend.
The former catcher referenced comments that Schneider had made about not wanting to upset his half-billion-dollar player.
“He said it himself, ‘Oh, we don’t want to piss Vladdy off. We don’t want to upset him.’ Really? Why?” Zaun said. “How do you not have the ability and the relationship with your star player having managed him all the way through the minor leagues to walk into a room, in a closed-door meeting and have those tough conversations?”
Guerrero Jr.’s struggles this season have been apparent and very well-documented. In the first season of his massive 14-year contract extension, the six-time all-star has hit just one home run at Rogers Centre and nine in total.
Why didn’t Schneider bench Vladdy?
Last month, Schneider was asked about potentially moving Guerrero Jr. down in the lineup in hopes to reinvigorate the team’s struggling offence.
“There’s been thoughts of it, I just don’t know what the outcome would be,” Schneider said. “I don’t want to punish him. I think if there were guys tearing the cover off the ball, that would be a little easier to think about, too.
“We are built, as a team, for Vlad to be a focal point of our offence. I don’t think that, with where he hits, he will be pitched very differently. I don’t think there will be more or less pressure if he’s hitting down in the order. I want him up in important spots.”
Of course, not much has changed since Schneider made the comments and the Jays are on the verge of being eliminated from the AL wild-card race.
What else did Gregg Zaun say?
But the team’s struggles are not entirely on Guerrero Jr., with Zaun placing some blame on the team culture.
“I look at the Jays as a whole, I look at the culture of the Jays. They’re more worried about home run jackets than they are getting a guy over, getting a guy in, hitting a cutoff man, calling the right pitches when it matters most,” he said. “There’s been no conversation about any of those key things.”
But ultimately, he brought it back to Schneider’s leadership.
“If (players) don’t look in the dugout and know that there’s a tough conversation coming after the game, and it doesn’t have to be in public, it shouldn’t be in public in fact,” Zaun said. “But these tough conversations have to be happening. Why are they not happening?”
What is Zaun’s history with the Blue Jays?
Zaun, who played five of his 16 seasons in the majors with Toronto, joined Sportsnet as an in-studio analyst after he retired from playing in 2010.
However, Zaun’s time at the national sports broadcasting network came to a controversial end in 2017, when he was accused by several female coworkers of “inappropriate behaviour.”
Last year, Zaun opened up during a podcast appearance about his unceremonious departure, including about the allegations made against him and how greatly they have affected him personally and professionally.
“I definitely made mistakes. I let celebrity get in my head,” Zaun said during an episode of the Toronto Legends podcast. “I was never as famous in Canada as a player as I was as a broadcaster. I mean, I couldn’t walk down the street.
“My life was turned upside down, ruined. My professional career, ruined,” he added. “I can’t get a job in television. There’s not a lot of forgiveness for people that look like me in this world. And it’s my fault. It’s absolutely my fault.”
Zaun served as the head coach of the Kelowna Falcons of the West Coast League for the 2026 season, during which the team went 30-24 and finished fourth in the North Division and lost in the division semifinals to the Wenatchee AppleSox — the eventual league champions.