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Here's something a baseball general manager said about Cito Gaston, the manager whose 2009 Blue Jays, however improbably, still lead baseball's most difficult division, the American League East.

"He relaxed these guys. He got them going. There was a lot of talent on (the) team, but these guys have to feel they want to express it. He let them express it on the field.''

Express it on the field? You think? Since Gaston, the Jays manager from 1989 through 1997, returned to take over last June from John Gibbons, a likeable baseball lifer who simply couldn't get the team's engine running, the Jays are 71-48 (before last night's game). That record, best in the league over that time, arrives despite a rookie-heavy starting pitching staff that, certainly this season, is about three-fifths smoke and mirrors.

Gaston's second act a lot like the first
Jays manager reminding AL of burning desire to compete

Cito Gaston has a philosophy that has helped him throughout his life. Whether he is dealing with something as simple and frustrating as sitting in traffic, or he is confronted with a more complicated scenario -- say, going more than a decade without a managing job -- Gaston goes back to one saying.

"'This is where I'm supposed to be,'" Gaston said. "That belief, it calms you."

It is that idea that has helped Gaston live with the fact that he was out of the game as a manager for 11 years before the Blue Jays came calling last June. He won two World Series championships with Toronto in the early '90s, becoming the first African-American manager to capture baseball's crown in the process.

I'm amazed that he didn't get a job or wasn't offered a job," Blue Jays general manager J.P. Ricciardi said. "You think about some guys who have gotten jobs who have received second or third opportunities and really don't have the same credentials that he has.

tsherkin wrote:I think JP has to haev a lot of balls to bemoan that Cito didn't get an opportunity when Ricciardi himself elected to hire Gibbons instead of Gaston.