DUNEDIN, Fla. — Though it has not yet been made official, reliable sources confirm that John Gibbons is about to sign a contract extension that will pay him to manage the Toronto Blue Jays at least through the 2019 season.
Being paid to manage and actually holding the job are not the same thing, as a cursory glance at the history of professional sport reveals. Sometimes the tail end of a contract is little more than a golden parachute.
But this is a vote of confidence with dollars and cents attached, one that didn’t seem at all likely the day Mark Shapiro arrived as the Jays’ new president.
Everybody wants their own guy. Every president wants his own general manager, every general manager want his own coach. It’s only natural, given how inter-dependent those roles tend to be.
Here you had a process-driven, new-age front office in a forced marriage with an old-school, gut-instinct skipper. Not exactly a match made in heaven.
But it has worked through a trip to the post-season, and if they’re still not exactly each other’s dream date, a level of mutual respect and appreciation has grown over the past season and a bit. Gibbons has bought in to some of what the new guys have been preaching and has formed a solid working relationship with GM Ross Atkins, while the front office has come to realize what a lot of people in the sport already know: that behind the self-effacing public personality and the Texas twang lurks a first-rate baseball mind, and more important than that, a first-rate manager of human beings.
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Would we be having a different conversation right now had the Jays lost to Texas in the Division Series in 2015, or had they fallen short that final weekend in Boston last fall and missed the playoffs after being in first place on Sept. 1? Would Bud Black or someone similar be occupying the tiny manager’s office in Dunedin?
Could be.
But that’s not what happened, and so the shared journey continues, the latest in a series of unlikely actions and reactions that brought Gibbons back to the majors and gave him the chance to prove that he could deal with a challenging clubhouse, deftly manage a bullpen that for long stretches didn’t seem to have all of the necessary parts, and, on the big stage, hold his own against managers who were much more adept at buffing their genius credentials (yes, that would be Buck Showalter).
All of that said, there’s no one more surprised about where John Gibbons is right now than John Gibbons.
He was living at home, happily managing the San Antonio team in the Texas League, when Alex Anthopoulos called him in the fall of 2012 and asked if he might be interested in a big-league coaching gig. That, as you may recall, was in the wake of a disastrous season for the Jays that ended with the Yunel Escobar eye-black fiasco and John Farrell’s departure for his dream job in Boston.
Farrell was Anthopoulos’s first managerial hire, and he ticked every box except one – trust. Gibbons, as Anthopoulos knew from his first stint in Toronto, was a salt-of-the-earth character, someone who would have his back, which is why the idea of having him coach quickly evolved into having him run the team again.
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There was considerable skepticism inside and outside the organization at the hiring. During that first chaotic spring — after the Marlins trade and the arrival of R.A. Dickey and the Jays being anointed as World Series favourites without playing a game — Gibbons seemed like the wrong guy to play ringmaster in that particular circus. But he survived. He survived the rocky start in 2015 (when for a time it seemed like both he and Anthopoulos might be fired…). He evolved, he showed his mettle and he proved to be the right man to handle a veteran roster filled with strong, bordering-on-abrasive personalities.
In 2016, he proved it all over again.
Cito Gaston, the only manager to win more games for the Blue Jays, was never hired by another organization, despite winning two World Series. Gibbons, if he were on the open market tomorrow, still might not be at the top of anyone else’s shopping list. Reputations in this sport are hard to make and unmake.
But by being re-upped by an administration that arrived owing him not a thing, he has made his point. In every way that matters, Gibbons has been up to the task.