JC said:
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.
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 **** 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?
