“99.9 per cent chance” Gibbons is gone after the season
By Cam Lewis
5 years agoI think this is pretty much a foregone conclusion that everybody has accepted by this point, but Jon Heyman wrote today that the Blue Jays will have a new manager next season.
While nothing’s set in stone, one person familiar with the thinking of both parties, said it was “99.9 percent done” that the Jays would hire a new manager next season. Gibbons and GM Ross Atkins are said to have spoken multiple times about the plans, so sources say this would not come as a surprise to Gibbons.“We’ll sit down after the year and see what direction we’re going to go, myself included,” Gibbons said by phone.Atkins declined to comment.
Like I said, this is something that’s been coming for a while. When the Cleveland Boys took over in 2015, they ultimately decided to keep Gibby around after he helped lead the Jays to their first post-season berth in two decades. That isn’t really standard practice as a new front office will generally bring in a new manager, but they ended up keeping Gibby around for three more years, handing him an extension prior to the 2017 season.
I wrote on this in early August when Stephen Brunt appeared on radio to suggest that the Jays were going to move in a new direction. My thinking was that it was fair to bring in a younger, more new-school manager for the rebuild, but it would be gross if they let Gibby go before the end of the season. This front office hasn’t had all too much grace with handling PR, but they managed the Gibby situation in a nice and fair manner, I think.
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