Manage a Major League Baseball team, check. Take your wife out to lunch, check. Save a life, check.
Toronto Blue Jays manager John Schneider performed the Heimlich maneuver on a woman at a restaurant in Dunedin, Fla. a couple of weeks ago when he noticed she had begun choking and was struggling to breathe.
According to Sportnet’s Hazel Mae and Shi Davidi, he walked over to help the woman and remembered the maneuver he learned in grade school. He assisted in helping her dislodge a piece of shrimp.
“I’m eating lunch [with my wife] and a woman was choking on a, I think it was a shrimp, and I wandered over there, asked if I could help, no one on her table was helping. A couple Heimlich’s and she was all good,” Schneider told reporters.
Despite learning it back in the day, the 43-year-old Schneider told himself, “I think I remember how to do this.”
“I’m a bigger guy so I think that helped a little bit,” he explained. “But yeah, I hadn’t thought about the Heimlich Maneuver since sixth grade.”
“It wasn’t like a movie, it wasn’t like across the table, it just kinda came up naturally,” Schneider laughed. “It wasn’t like popping a bottle of Champagne.”
The Blue Jays hired Schneider as the full-time manager on a three-year contract with a club option for 2026. This dropped the “interim” title after taking over for Charlie Montoyo who was fired on July 13 last season.
Under Schneider, the team went 46-28 and captured a top wild-card spot in the American League.
He can save a team, and save a life.
