Remember back in April when everyone was blaming John Gibbons for the Blue Jays’ failings? That was funny.
The memory has faded a little bit now. Not sure if it was one loss, or two losses, or three losses into the 2013 MLB season when #FireGibbons first appeared on Twitter.
It was a joke at the beginning of April, a parody of the knee-jerk reactions that social media tend to spawn, but soon enough it wasn’t. During that disastrous first month for the Toronto Blue Jays, a fan base desperate to back a winner and whipped into a frenzy of high expectation during a winter of dramatic moves badly needed a scapegoat.
Why didn’t the Jays manager John Gibbons do something? Why didn’t he and his coaches find a way to make those hitters hit better and those pitchers pitch better?
Why did he just sit there in the dugout as games were pissed away, or stand with his arms hanging over the railing, munching on sunflower seeds, impassive behind his sunglasses?
Why did they bring this guy back, instead of going out and hiring a big-time, big-name manager like Terry Francona or Tony La Russa?
It’s way too early for I-told-you-so’s. The story of this Jays season is still to be written. But a couple of things became evident during the crazy roller-coaster ride of its first three months.
A lot of people, returning to the sport after a pause or tuning in for the first time in their lives, were still struggling to process what it means to play out the longest campaign in sport. There are precious few be-all and end-all moments when it takes 162 games to decide who moves on—or more accurately, there are a whole bunch of them, little spikes and depressions, the beginnings and ends of good times and bad times, even for the very best teams and the very worst.
A year never turns on an inning or an at-bat or a game or a single series. Not until October. As a fan, and as someone covering a team (some of the local sports media have become very fan-like this time around, similarly out of practice following a team that matters), you have to resist the impulse to make grand declarations, and just let baseball happen.
Dissatisfaction immediately morphed into demands for Gibbons’s head on a pike because we live in an era in which fans and media have made a fetish of coaching in all sports. So much of the conversation from the outside is about the X’s and O’s, the strategic machinations, the inspirational speeches in the clubhouse. If the right boss is in place, punching all the right buttons, winning is inevitable. Even saddled with a roster overpopulated by stiffs, the myth is that the best can still whip up chicken salad.
The truth is, coaching genius, or its opposite, has limited impact, arguably more limited in baseball than in the once-a-week, hyper-emotional world of football, or the increasingly systems-dominated world of hockey.
A baseball manager fills out his lineup card. In some games, but not all, he is forced to make tactical decisions, to hit and run or sacrifice or swing away, to bring in the infielders or guard the lines or opt for double-play depth. Mostly, though, he just sits back and watches like the rest of us.
Far more important than inspirational clubhouse speechifying (one of the most revered managers of the modern era, Felipe Alou, hardly ever even ventured into the players’ side of the room before or after a game) is handling the bullpen: understanding matchups, knowing when to sit still, when to move, knowing who is exhausted, who is sore, who has a little more to give. Even as all manner of catastrophes were befalling his Blue Jays during the early weeks of this season, Gibbons actually did a masterful job of that.
Walter Alston, the revered former manager of the Dodgers, he of the endless string of one-year contracts, managed for 23 seasons in the Bigs. Seven times he won the pennant. Four of those were topped with a World Series win. He also finished seventh a couple of times in the old National League configuration, and finished eighth two seasons in a row.
Earl Weaver had four pennants and one World Series win in 17 years with the Orioles, La Russa six and three over 33 seasons with three different teams.
That’s baseball, where even the very best teams lose a whole bunch of games, where even the very best managers sometimes fail to spin gold out of straw.
The virtue a game like that ought to inspire is patience.
Yes, that impulse runs counter to the culture right now, in which everything is there, instantly, for the taking.
But it can sure come in handy over the long season of real life.
This story originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine. Subscribe here.