During his tenure as Toronto Blue Jays manager, John Gibbons reached consecutive American League Championship Series in 2015 and 2016.Patrick Semansky/The Associated Press
While his former team is trying to complete what he started a decade ago, John Gibbons is in Houston for a wedding. He’s rented a house with a big TV with a satellite dish.
“It’s got about a thousand channels,” Gibbons said. “I can’t find any of the normal channels where the baseball games are on.”
So he followed the Jays’ big win in New York on his phone.
“Is the whole country on fire again?” he asked. Not quite yet, but soon.
The Jays have had a few successful men in charge, including the current one, but Gibbons remains a kind of ur-manager. He was the guy who best inhabited the manager role – a good ol’ boy with a sense of humour and, when required, a temper. Perhaps you too fondly remember his many ejections.
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He’s been working for the New York Mets recently, as their bench coach, but was just part of a purge after a disappointing end to their season. That’s left him free to think about baseball as a general proposition.
“That team you got up there” – this is another change in the way Gibbons talks. Now it’s ‘my’ team, despite the fact that I have yet to receive any cheques – “that’s a good baseball-type team.”
Gibbons means the sort of team that does everything pretty well, rather than just one thing very well.
“Everybody wants power, power, power. Who cares if you can catch it, as long as you can hit it.”
In Gibbons estimation, the Jays can catch it, too.
Toronto Blue Jays’ Jose Bautista throws his bat in the air after hitting a three-run homer against the Texas Rangers in the American League Division Series in 2015.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
He’s a little nostalgic about the sainted 2015 team he ran – the team of Bautista, Donaldson, Price and Tulowitzki. About the holy trade deadline and the beatified bat flip.
“But we had a lot of big personalities on that team. It wasn’t like it was a stress-free environment.”
Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
“I was up with that ’86 Mets team [that won a World Series]. That was a wild bunch. They fought all the time. Then they’d go out and win a game, and come back into the clubhouse and start fighting each other again. So I don’t think it matters a whole lot.”
This Jays team is always going on about how friendly and relaxed they are with each other. They say nothing gets to them.
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“The main thing is talent.”
And the other thing?
Gibbons thinks for a minute – “If you focus on the main thing, you can co-exist.”
I get the feeling he’s trying to tell me something here, and that I’m just not getting it.
He recalls that when he first got the Jays job – during a rough stretch in the mid Aughts – management told him how great things would be once the team won.
John Gibbons had a record of 793-789 during his 11 seasons in charge of the Toronto Blue Jays, reaching the playoffs on two occasions.Gerry Angus/USA TODAY Sports via Reuters
“People would say, ‘If you guys are relevant in August or September, just watch what happens to this country. Not just Toronto. The whole country.’ But every year, the Yankees and the Red Sox would pull away by the end of June.”
It took him more than 10 years, a firing and a rehiring to get there.
“It was just like everybody said. We caught fire, and the town caught fire, and the country caught fire.”
Gibbons wasn’t always Mr. Popularity in his second home. He had his own reputation as a one-man wild bunch during his first stint in charge. He always lived in condos within a few blocks of the park. He’d walk to and from work every day.
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“My first go-round there, I was kind of [a] pariah. People would look at me and look away.”
And from 2015 on?
“We started winning. Now everybody was smiling, and they all wanted to take a picture with me. I’d shed the plague.”
Gibbons laughs like crazy at that one. He always loved a joke, especially one at his own expense.
He’s as close as it gets to a neutral, but still informed, observer. He’s spent the last two years doing a lot of the advanced scouting for one of the most hopeful outfits in baseball. Tell me true – do the Jays have a chance?
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“I think they do,” Gibbons said, like he’s surprising himself by saying it. “The Dodgers, they’re starting to get guys back. They got a ton of talent. But I think [the Jays] can definitely get there. And if they do that, then why not?”
As he says it, I am remembering a typical Gibbons press availability. He could not tell a lie, on a team that told a lot of them, so he often put things in contingent future tense. If everything goes perfectly, then the Jays would win. He is in that mode now.
Mostly, he’s excited at the idea that Toronto is excited. He’s less interested in the baseball end of things than in how the city “feels.” It’s getting hot, I tell him. People I know who don’t care about baseball are all of a sudden asking me about baseball. More ball caps on the street car. More blue in the streets.
“I know how special that place is up there and how much it would mean to them,” Gibbons said. “If it ain’t gonna be the Leafs, it might as well be the Jays.”
He’s still giggling at that one when we hang up.