TORONTO — While the Blue Jays on the field will look very different in 2017, the ones offering tutelage from the bench will not as the club is retaining nearly every single member of its coaching staff next season.
The lone casualty is assistant hitting coach Eric Owens, who was not asked to return. Otherwise, the Blue Jays will maintain the same staff that helped them to a second consecutive American League Championship Series appearance.
“Everyone has been invited back and wants to be back and is motivated to be a part of this,” Blue Jays general manager Ross Atkins said in a meeting with Toronto media Monday afternoon. “Everyone will be back.”
That includes manager John Gibbons, bench coach DeMarlo Hale, hitting coach Brook Jacoby, pitching coach Pete Walker, bullpen coach Dane Johnson, and base coaches Tim Leiper and Luis Rivera.
Owens was not asked to return because his role was considered to overlap too much with that of Jacoby, the hitting coach proper. The Blue Jays will replace Owens with another staff member focusing on the offensive side of the game, but the role will be more encompassing and won’t concentrate exclusively on hitting.
“It’s about how we can complement our major league staff,” Atkins said. “There was some redundancy in [Owens’] skill set and some of our other staff members. And that’s not any fault of his.”
The Blue Jays are currently assessing the candidates available to fill the role and determining exactly what they would like that individual to do. In all likelihood, the role won’t have an official title or thrust until the winning candidate is identified, and will be tailored to that individual’s skillset.
“It most likely will be focused on offence,” Atkins said. “But we want to consider and write that job description and then consider who’s available before we title it.”
The club may also explore a contract extension with Gibbons this off-season, as the veteran manager is entering the final year of his contract.
Under former GM Alex Anthopoulos, Gibbons’ contract included a rolling option for the following season that became guaranteed annually on the first day of January. So, on Jan. 1, 2016, Gibbons’ contract became guaranteed for 2017.
That unique setup ensured Gibbons would never face a scenario where he was leading a team during the final year of his contract, a situation commonly viewed throughout professional sports as an uncomfortable one for a manager or head coach.
But before the start of the 2016 season, Atkins and the Blue Jays reworked Gibbons’ contract, giving him a pay raise for 2016 and ’17 while eliminating the rolling option. That means that this New Year’s Day, Gibbons won’t get a guaranteed year added to his deal for 2018.
The move made sense, considering Gibbons was the only manager in baseball with such a clause in his deal and that he had little prior history with Atkins and new team president Mark Shapiro. The pay increase rewarded Gibbons for leading the Blue Jays to the ALCS in 2015, while eliminating the option gave the new front office a more traditional arrangement with its manager and flexibility to bring in a new one they were familiar with in case things went sour in 2016.
Of course, that didn’t happen. Gibbons took his team back to the ALCS, and earned the trust of Shapiro and Atkins along the way, deftly handling a challenging clubhouse featuring several passionate veteran personalities and many young, high-upside players with unique needs, such as Aaron Sanchez whose workload was closely monitored.
You never know how forced marriages such as the one between Gibbons and Shapiro/Atkins are going to turn out, but by all accounts this one has been thoroughly positive. Even as the Blue Jays on the field evolve and transform over the coming months and years, it appears there is interest from the front office in keeping the gregarious Texan in the fold for the long run.
“That’s always something that’s mutual. And John Gibbons and I have started to talk about that,” Atkins said. “We’ve had discussions—over the course of the year, not just in the last five days—about what it means to us to do that together. And they’ve gone very well, those discussions.”