Alex Anthopoulos pulled another rabbit out of his hat with the (re)signing of John Gibbons to manage the 2013 Blue Jays. This came as a surprise to just about everyone, except for Toronto Sun columnist Bob Elliott, who only wrote about this possibility yesterday. Gibbons, in his opening remarks, even said how out of the blue this was. He said that he was following the managerial search and that the media "were way off!" but did single out Elliott for getting it right.
How do I feel, as a humble blogger, about this piece of news? Fine. I always liked Gibby and his down-home folksy charm. Word is that the players (with a couple of notable exceptions) loved to play for him and AA has commented that he loves Gibby's bullpen management. Mike Wilner (@Wilnerness590 on the Twitter) has also commented that he really uses platoons well, so we probably won't see much of an Adam Lind-type doing much hitting against left-handed pitching.
Many more people have brought up Gibby's incidents with Shea Hillenbrand and Ted Lilly (you can read about it at many other blogs), but Alex Anthopoulos says that there's not much of a concern there, and Gibby himself said that he felt like he learned from the incidents. For me, it's a non-starter: at least he seems to care.
Personally, I don't think the manager has a heck of a lot of influence on the game and Gibbons said that he feels that his role is to get the most out of the players. That's a really refreshing thing to hear from a manager who doesn't over-inflate his self importance.
Bringing Gibbons back also gives us a super fun drinking game to play when watching Blue Jays games and listening to post-game interviews. We can take bets on the over/under of "I'll tell you what"s that Gibbons and commentator Buck Martinez throw out there in the course of a day, or just simply drink when we hear one.
It's gonna be a fun year, I'll tell you what.
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