Thanks for the memories Cito Gaston

I should have qualified my statement - I'll do so now.

Plenty of guys won fewer games that mattered, and fewer championships, with teams that were just as talented, if not more so.

Earl Weaver did win more games with some stacked Baltimore Orioles teams - he reached 100 wins five times and won four pennants - but he only won one World Series, in 1970.

He's joined in the Hall of Fame by Whitey Herzog, also a one-time World Series winner despite managing some very talented Royals and Cardinals teams. He topped 100 wins twice and won three pennants. Neither of his 100-win teams captured the World Series.

Between 1983 and 2005, a period of time during which he was never not employed as a major league manager, Tony LaRussa took three different franchises to 10 division titles and/or pennants. On nine of those occasions, his teams won 95 games or more. They reached or surpassed 100 wins four times. Never did one of those four 100-win teams also capture the World Series. When LaRussa finally won his second ring in 2006, in his 30th season of managing, it was with a team that had won 83 games in the regular season, which isn't as many as Toronto will win this year.

Mike Hargrove led some stacked Indians teams through the last half of the '90s, including the 1995 edition that went 100-44. He won five straight division titles....and zero World Series.

The winner of the 1995 World Series? Bobby Cox and the Atlanta Braves, who never won it before, and haven't won it since despite 14 straight division titles. In six of those 14 seasons, they won 101 or more games.....but didn't even win the pennant on five of those six occasions. Like Herzog and LaRussa, Cox never won a Series with any of his 100-win teams.

Meanwhile, the Toronto Blue Jays have won 100 or more games exactly zero times. The franchise record for wins in a season is 99 and that was a Bobby Cox-managed team that won the division and then, as Cox's teams so often did, flamed out when it mattered.

Under Cito Gaston, Toronto's best record was 96-66 in 1992. But the Jays, and he, won the majority of the games that counted in October of that year and the following year. Unlike so many of Gaston's colleagues, as noted above.

And yet the majority of those above-noted colleagues, with the exception of Hargrove, are or certainly will be in the Hall of Fame. Gaston, meanwhile, is likely to have a difficult time getting in without buying a ticket. And that's a shame, because he belongs as surely as do any of them.

 

Sorry, as someone who followed those Blue Jay teams very closely the term winning in spite of comes to mind. Pat Gillick and the players are the reason they won. Gillick made some great moves for those teams.

Cito's in game managing decisions were very questionable, there's a reason he was never hired after winning back to back titles. He is barely over 500 for his career. He handled veterans well but was not a good in game manager and was not very good with young players and pitching staffs.

 

This "who couldn't win with those guys?" is a lazy argument that people have also applied to teams like the Canadiens of the 70's.

Gaston knew how to manage all those hot shots as people, not just players. It's like any organization. You can have the best and the brightest but unless you can have someone who can make sure you get the best out of everyone and keep the egos in check, you son't be successful. From what I read, Cito treated his players with respect but was not a pushover.

 

So how come the teams I cited above could not win, in most cases, regardless of how talented they were?

It's just funny that Bobby Cox is being hailed as, supposedly, the greatest manager of his generation. For all of his so-called greatness, and for all of the talent he has managed in Atlanta, he has one World Series title on his resume. And it did not come in head-to-head play against Toronto. Did the Braves not win because of Cox? In spite of Cox? Which is it?

Cox's teams, with one exception, don't seal the deal. It happened in '85 in Toronto and it happened time and again in Atlanta. That's on the manager.

As for how good Gaston was with young talent, Pat Hentgen and Robbie Alomar made it pretty clear last night that he had been invaluable in their development. Hentgen was 24 when he made it to the Jays for good, and Alomar was turning 23 when he came over from San Diego.

And any question about Gaston's managing ability should have been put to rest once and for all in Game 3 of the 1993 World Series. He couldn't use Paul Molitor as the DH because the game was in Philadelphia and being played under National League rules. So Gaston benched the American League batting champion, putting Molitor at first base in place of John Olerud. How do you justify sitting a guy who had flirted with .400 for most of the season? But he did it. And Molitor responded, as Gaston must have known he would, going three-for-four with a home run and three runs batted in as the Jays won easily.

"The best manager that I ever had," according to Alomar, who also played for Series-winning managers Jack McKeon, Davey Johnson, Bob Brenly and Ozzie Guillen, as well as for Mike Hargrove and well-known baseball genius Bobby Valentine.

As for why Cito was never hired by anyone else, I'm sure there are many reasons. One of them has to do with where he achieved his greatest success - Toronto? Nobody in baseball gives a fuck about Toronto. But if he'd won anything at all in any American city, he'd have people lined up around the block offering him jobs.

Another reason is the fact that he never really wanted to be a manager in the first place - he loved and preferred being a hitting coach, both before and after his first managerial stints. I don't think he's a very good self-promoter, which certainly couldn't have helped him when the White Sox job came down to him versus Ozzie Guillen.

One reason is most certainly his skin colour. If he were a white man, again, he'd have had job offers galore the minute he retired as a player.

Look at Jim Leyland, for instance. You can talk all you want about Cito's career winning percentage, which, it's true, is not far above .500. But Leyland, 19 years and 3,000 games into his big league career - and, as a career .222 hitter in the minors, he never even came close to the bigs as a player, unlike Gaston - is only now approaching .500. He wasn't .500 in Pittsburgh despite winning three division titles in 11 years. He wasn't even .500 in Florida, where he managed the Marlins for only two years and won the World Series in the first year! Why is this guy still gainfully employed?

Or Gene Mauch, who managed four different teams for 26 seasons, during which time he was never out of work. He only ever won two division titles (no pennants), and the first of them came in his 23rd season. He won 1,900 games but lost 2,000. Why did he keep getting hired?

 

Cito Sucks. [/baltimore]

 

Cito Gaston won a World Series in 1993 with:

Devon White
Roberto Alomar
Joe Carter
Paul Molitor
John Olerud
Ed Sprague
Juan Guzman
Pat Hentgen
Dave Stewart
Duane Ward
Al Leiter

Cito Gaston finished tied for dead last in the majors in 1995 with:

Devon White
Roberto Alomar
Joe Carter
Paul Molitor
John Olerud
Ed Sprague
Juan Guzman
Pat Hentgen
David Cone
Duane Ward
Al Leiter

 

I think we're completely overblowing the impact a manager has on baseball games.

And the World Series is often a 7-game crapshoot that relies heavily on which team is playing well at the right time.

Baseball is a player's game, not a coach's game.

I don't mean to pick on Cito Gaston but my philosophy in general is that managers get way too much credit and way too much blame.

 

They didn't win because the other team has something to say about it.

His brilliant move of starting Molitor instead of Olerud was a no brainer considering they were facing a lefty and Molitor finshed either second or third in the batting race that year.

If you want to give him credit for the 2 world series titles, fine, I can buy the managing of egos being big on a team loaded with talent but where's the blame for the other years?

Pleas spare me the Toronto as some sort of outpost, they had the highest payroll in the game and attracted free agents back then. It sure didn't stop Gillick from getting other jobs. Jobs where he had a chance to hire a 2 time world series champion manager in which he chose to pass.

Shaggy has it right, managers get to much credit and to much blame for their teams situations.

 

The Blue Jays won two world series under him. That's all that matters.

The Gillick/Beeston/Gaston era was perhaps the greatest of any Toronto sports franchise and went dramatically downhill after they left.

The Jays hit rock bottom when they hired that putz Ricciardi who, after Vince Carter, may be the most disliked sports personality in the history of the city. Yeah, even more than Harold Ballard.

 

JR, are you largely satisfied or dissatisfied with the Jays' current 25-man roster?

 

Joe Girardi.

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