The Blue Jays are 73-49 since Cito Gaston returned to the helm last season, which is the best record in baseball in that stretch. Some insight into why that may be can be found in this Gaston profile from the Toronto Star over the weekend. Money quote:
"He came back and resurrected this team,'' said Paul Beeston, Gaston's boss as team president both then and now, but his friend constantly. "I put it down to his presence and to his ability to communicate with the players, to never have them be surprised. As good as he was at communicating back then, I'd say he's even better at it now. I don't know how he does it. I don't think there's anybody who can say a negative word about John Gibbons. To know him is to like him. But Cito somehow gets through.''
Gaston's example is a pretty good argument for simply finding a guy with the right temperament and sticking with him. Managers get all of the heat when things go bad and, like Gaston a decade ago, they get fired for it. It probably happens too often, however. Unless a guy has simply lost his team like Willie Randolph had last season, it's probably best not to rock the boat too much. As long as the guy filling out the lineup card is steady, grounded and trustworthy, he's likely to do about as well with the talent he is provided as can be done and unlikely to have a team that radically under-performs. With so many other moving parts of a ballclub, one would think that a GM could make his life so much easier by simply installing a guy as manager and leaving him be.
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Regardless of his success (and, perhaps, rational thought), I will never forgive him for the Mike Mussina/All Star Game incident in Baltimore back in the day.
Cito never did anything wrong to Mussina - Mussina warmed up in the bullpen on his own, upset that he was not going to be put into the game infront of the home crowd.
Cito had said before the game that he was going to hold back one starter in the event the game went extra innings. Mussina warmed up on his own account, riling up the fans to chant for his entrance to the game. Seeing it as being shown up, Cito simply stuck to his guns and did not insert Mussina in the game in the 9th inning.
As mad as Baltimore fans were for not seeing Mike in the ballgame, Toronto fans were upset at Mussina for showing up the AL manager - on the very team Mike was playing on.
It is hard for me to figure how a guy with two World Series championships was not given an opportunity to manage by another ball club. Teams were bringing announcers out of the booth and into the dugout, but Cito didn't seem to get any job offers. Now he is back with Toronto and doing well. If Dusty Baker can keep getting jobs, why couldn't Cito?
The story with Cito (as I understand it anyway) was that he was offered a lot of interviews, no small number of which may have been token interviews so that the clubs could say that they were courting minority candidates. This kind of miffed him, and he decided not to interview with anyone for years, even though some of the offers were legitimate. I think this may have been the case with the White Sox in particular, who reportedly wanted Gaston, while Gaston sort of took the attitude of "if you want me, hire me, but I'm not coming to interview."
I believe that the White Sox situation was the last straw for Cito-he interviewed for it, and didn't get it. Now, you can't really argue with the White Sox success with the guy they picked, but as I understand it Cito at that point took the position that he'd managed eight and a half seasons in the big leagues and won four division titles and two World Series, and if you wanted him you should hire him. I can't say that sounds unreasonable-I can't think of a manager with Cito's track record who's had to interview for a new gig.
As Jonathan notes, there are hard feelings on both sides of the now 16 year old Mussina All-Star Game controversy. I've heard that the Orioles asked Cito not to pitch Mussina; whether that's true or not I couldn't say. I suppose I could understand Orioles fans being upset that Mussina didn't pitch, if it weren't for the fact that his warming up in the bullpen escalated the thing beyond what would have been a minor story in the post-game press conference into something that sufficiently old Jays and Orioles fans still talk smack about. It was a bush league thing to do, but no Jays fan who knows anything about Mike Mussina is surprised by him acting like an ass-this is a guy who publicly complained that a pregame tribute to the late Tom Cheek disrupted his pregame routine. Cito had it right when he was asked about it last year.