GIBBONS RECEIVES HERO’S GOODBYE
Blue Jays’ manager reflects on career after final home game, a win over Series champs
The walls of the office were barren. The pictures and the kids’ drawings that used to surround John Gibbons’ desk have been taken down. On this, the final home day of a long season, the manager’s office is filled only with his stuff: suitcases and memories.
And he’s trying not to be sentimental about the 11 seasons he managed the Toronto Blue Jays, but there is one giant opportunity lost he still has trouble letting go of.
“I have regrets,” said Gibbons in an interview on the day it was announced he would not return as manager.
“I regret we didn’t get to the World Series. I thought we had the team (in 2015). That was a really good team. We exploded in the second half of the season.” And then he looks back at Game 6 in Kansas City, the American League Championship Series, and the events of that crushing night still haunt him. “We had men on second and third, no outs. (Dalton) Pompey stole second and then he stole third. We’re down a run and we had our best contact guys coming up. We had Ben Revere, one of the best contact hitters in the game, and we had (Dioner) Navarro pinch-hitting after him, and he was one of the best at putting the ball in play, and they had the infield in. I think they both struck out. And then the MVP (Josh Donaldson) was coming up. It was all going our way.” Donaldson’s groundout ended the dream in 2015. The playoff team a year later wasn’t as dominant, wasn’t as deep. “I like the way that team pushed their way into the playoffs. We were no sure thing,” said Gibbons. “I was proud of that. But I really thought, in 2015, we had the team to get there. We had the team to win.”
It was as close as the Blue Jays have come to the World Series since winning in 1993.
It seems like yesterday and it seems like a long time ago. Those were the two recent seasons that changed baseball in Canada and turned Gibbons from a little known, somewhat lightly regarded manager to a man who got a standing ovation Wednesday following a 3-1 Blue Jays victory. A hero’s goodbye after one of the most confounding seasons in Blue Jays history.
He leaves surprisingly beloved. Who gets fired and has a news conference sitting beside the general manager and being praised by Ross Atkins for the man he is and all he learned from him?
At the beginning in Toronto, when he was appointed interim manager after the forgotten Carlos Tosca was fired, he was an acquired taste.
And how his second stint as Jays manager came to be still astounds Gibbons.
“They crowned us champions that winter (2013) after Alex (then GM Anthopoulos) made those big trades. Everybody was expecting big things, but it never happened. I even said to Alex a couple of times, ‘Bringing me back, are you sure this was the right thing to do?’ I felt like I was letting him down. He took a chance on me and it wasn’t working out.
“I told him, if you want me to leave, I’ll leave.”
There are those in scouting positions around baseball who believe this train wreck of a season was Gibbons’ finest as a big-league manager.
His two star starting pitchers, Marcus Stroman and Aaron Sanchez, contributed next to nothing. The closer, Roberto Osuna, had to be moved. Troy Tulowitzki never played a game and an unhealthy Donaldson barely played. And the team’s defence, with a makeshift lineup almost every night, was downright offensive.
Yet they kept on playing. “I’m proud of that,” Gibbons said. “We hung in there. I’m happy for the job our coaches did. We held it together. I think the No. 1 job of a manager is holding everything together.” Said one National League personnel man: “Gibby should be manager of the year for the job he did with the team they gave him.” A managing career that began with a championship in 1995. He was 33 years old back then. He went on to manage part of 11 seasons in Toronto, three years in triple-A, one season in doubleA at home in San Antonio and the year he’ll never forget, managing the Mets’ rookie league team in Kingsport, Tenn.
It was his first job and it remains his favourite story to tell.
“We had a staff of two, me and the pitching coach,” Gibbons said. “And the pitching coach broke his hand, losing it on a refrigerator as the season began. So I’m the only one who can throwing batting practice. The guy who owned the team was a big-time defence lawyer, so our grounds crew guy was a guy on parole. A week into the season, the grounds crew guy stopped showing up. Turns out, he violated his parole and went back to jail.
“So now, I get to the park, get on the tractor, drag the field, set up the field, and throw batting practice. And because a lot of our kids had no cars — we had a lot of Latin players who didn’t know where they were — I had a van and before the game I would drive around and pick up eight of them, bringing them to the park every day.
“And you know what? We won the championship that year. Best job I ever had.”