John Gibbons is what he is – the only manager in the American League East without a division title on his curriculum vitae; a low-talking Texan who is as dumb as a fox and who realizes that if 200 baseball people were gathered in a room and asked to rate the AL East managers one to five, he would finish an easy fifth.
He is, in other words, pretty much what he was when the Toronto Blue Jays fired him in June 2008, and what he was when they brought him back two years ago. And for many fans of the Blue Jays, that’s simply not good enough. I don’t agree with those who hold that notion, but I can’t dismiss it as being outrageous.
Unless the tea leaves are all wrong – and unless there’s some clubhouse revolt brewing along the lines of the one that Cito Gaston faced upon his return, or Jose Bautista calls out the skipper or there’s an appearance in the final weekend of anonymous nay-sayers referred to as “snipers” by Brian Burke – it seems as if Gibbons still enjoys the support of general manager Alex Anthopoulos, who in turn enjoys the confidence of the people he needs in his corner.
The reasons people want Gibbons fired seem pretty straight-forward and much of it has to do with perception. His career record is 10 games under .500 (460-470) and the company he keeps in the AL East is pretty remarkable: Tampa Bay’s Joe Maddon is a genius; Baltimore’s Buck Showalter is a micro-manager with macro sensibilities and has taken the Orioles to the playoffs twice in three seasons, including this season when they ran away and hid despite injuries to Matt Wieters and Manny Machado; New York’s Joe Girardi has World Series rings and, well, so too does that guy in Boston.
In the last five years all of those managers have won a division that is no longer a two-team domain. The Blue Jays seem unable to execute at crucial times, preferring to live and die by the home run, and they have several “dead-ass,” a description first offered up in fact by Gibbons himself, and his detractors see in that a reflection of the skipper himself.
Then, there was the exile of Kevin Pillar for a dug-out hissy fit. And what about that bullpen, the one area of the game where a manager exercises supreme match-up powers? Isn’t the Blue Jays’ among the worst in baseball?
Face it: if you thought Anthopoulos was being too cute by half in bringing back Gibbons after being stabbed in the back by John Farrell, you feel even more so right now.
At this time, let’s re-visit some of the commonly-held notions about this team coming out of spring training: they’d score a bunch of runs, most of them by home runs; they’d have tremendous depth and quality in the bullpen and the starting rotation – well, that was going to be a mess.
For some of us, it added up to maybe a fourth-place finish in the AL East, with a sniff, perhaps, of wild-card games in September. It was a major departure from the start of the 2013 season, when Las Vegas thought the Blue Jays would win the World Series.
If you’d told anybody at the start of the season that the Blue Jays would finish with a win total in the mid-80s, and be mathematically eliminated in the final week of the season, the response might have been “sounds about right – er, maybe a bit optimistic.”
Anybody who said they forecast a 21-9 month of May, or 61 days in first place, or a six-game lead atop the division while playing crackerjack defence and running the bases with flare while Mark Buehrle pitched his way through a career first half is, well, a liar. I don’t think Gibbons became a worse manager suddenly on June 7, when the free-fall started.
So let’s take a look at 2014.
That lousy starting pitching? Gibbons has managed to get rookie Marcus Stroman and Tommy John recipient Drew Hutchison, through the season healthy. He has shown a deft touch with rookie Aaron Sanchez as a short reliever – Sanchez will make it through September with his chest puffed out, knowing a major league manager has enough trust in him that he’s closed out games. Hutchison will make his 32nd start on Friday and will finish the season with the third-most innings on the Blue Jays staff.
You’re right, that’s not all on Gibbons. But if you saddle him with the responsibility for things that have backfired, he gets at least some credit for creating the environment that allowed young pitchers to flourish. That starting rotation, incidentally, has helped fire 16 shutouts, one shy of the club record set in 1997 when the rotation was 11th in the majors in WHIP and tied for seventh in WAR.
The Blue Jays hit homers. Lots of them. The third-most in the majors to go along with the fifth-best on-base percentage and seventh-best team batting average, despite losing Brett Lawrie and Edwin Encarnacion and, finally, Melky Cabrera for a prolonged period of time.
Meanwhile, Gibbons employed platoon after platoon; he moved Jose Bautista into the No. 2 spot when Cabrera went down. He hardly sat on his ass trying to squeeze offence out of a stone. The issue was that the players he was squeezing turned out not to be good enough. Every team has a 25th guy, the Blue Jays had five of them.
As for the bullpen? Too much faith was put both in Steve Delabar’s ability to repeat the magic of 2013 and Sergio Santos’ electric stuff, but it’s hard to lay that at Gibbons’ feet, anymore than you can Casey Janssen’s food poisoning over the All-Star Break or Dustin McGowan’s brain-farts.
The bullpen was a horror show, with the sixth-worst WHIP and the sixth-lowest percentage of strikes thrown. Tough to manage a bullpen when your All-Star set-up guy can’t throw strikes and your closer seems to have mysteriously checked out. With no help coming from the front office, Gibbons made shrewd use of Brett Cecil to finish games, as well as blooding the rookie Sanchez.
This was a season to try your soul, to be sure. The May record sure seems like an outlier, given what has transpired, and there remain unanswered questions about payroll, going back to the deferred salary crusade for Ervin Santana’s services and the quiet trade deadline. Disappointment is rampant, and while sober second thought doesn’t entirely remove culpability from Gibbons, a fair-mindedness suggests he is not at the top of the list of things that need changing for the Blue Jays to make the playoffs.
That won’t be enough for his critics though, most of them made up their mind about him a long, long time ago.