Jays fans reaction to Gibbons' hiring proves one thing: At this point, these people will talk themselves into anything.
Playoff baseball ratings were less than stellar this year. Game Four of the 2012 World Series, a series-clinching game that went to extra innings, was beaten by a somewhat insignificant Sunday Night Football matchup that night. Not only did football beat baseball, it beat it by over a million viewers in the United States. Reports afterward cited the aging demographic still watching America's favourite pastime. The over 50 crowd was still watching, but the under 50 crew, their attention spans shortened daily by social media and DVR's, were less willing to sit through three hours of dip chewing. It appeared to the outside observer that baseball was losing ground fast and in danger of aging as badly as Lindsay Lohan.
That's not the case in the TSN SportsCentre newsroom however. In our newsroom, one would swear that the grand ol' game is as popular as ever, and that's because our newsroom is largely populated by Greater Toronto Area-born and raised sports fans who have grown up loving the Toronto Blue Jays. Many of them, in fact most of them, are too young to remember the World Series victories of 1992 and 1993. Their love for the Jays endures however, and the fact that they are die-hard baseball fans obsessed with fantasy sports and sabermetrics makes them the kind of group that Bud Selig probably wishes he could kidnap, take to a lab, and replicate so he could fill all those empty seats at Rogers Centre.
So it was a fascinating social experiment to be among these rare young die-hards when highly-respected Toronto Sun writer Bob Elliott broke the news that John Gibbons would be returning as Blue Jays manager just minutes before we went live with SportsCentre at 1am et time Tuesday morning. Imagine a roomful of co-workers who had played the lottery together, only to find out they missed winning $50 million dollars by one number. That's the kind of deflated initial reaction that every single person in the room displayed. John Gibbons? Really?
There was no one, no one, calling for the return of John Gibbons to manage the Toronto Blue Jays. In fact, it's safe to say that had you suggested Gibbons as a candidate to this same group just days before the actual announcement on Tuesday morning, you would have been laughed out of the room. The Blue Jays had just acquired several big-time star players in a lopsided trade with the Miami Marlins, and signed 'almost' batting champ and recently suspended Melky Cabrera to a pretty sweet and fairly low-risk two-year deal that ESPN Senior Baseball writer David Shoenfield said could turn into "the best free agent signing this offseason".
The buzz around our newsroom, and more importantly, the entire city of Toronto, was palpable. The Blue Jays had a chance to really contend again, now they just needed a new manager to rally the troops. The possibilities were endless. Who wouldn't want to step in and manage this group of players? There was even talk of luring former Jays and Braves manager Bobby Cox out of retirement!
Then there was the requisite baggage that Gibbons came with: the confrontations with his own players and the fact that he had not actually won anything during his initial tenure with the team from 2004 to 2008. This was not Phil Jackson returning to the Lakers after bringing home multiple championships, this was another in a line of underwhelming Blue Jay managers of underwhelming Blue Jay teams from an underwhelming Blue Jay era that most of us would rather forget. There is something to be said of the phrase: "Your first instinct is your best instinct", and without question, every Jays fan's first instinct when they first heard the news about John Gibbons returning to manage this team was: You're joking, right?
Then the second part of the social experiment started to come to fruition: Denial and acceptance. Suddenly these die-hard Jays fans in the newsroom, who were initially shocked and disappointed by the move, started to rationalize it like a girl dating a guy she knows is probably not right for her but continues to see him anyway because she had no other potential suitors on the horizon. "After the initial shock, I'm starting to warm up to the Gibby hiring" said one of our editors and most die-hard of Jays fans. The reasons for Gibby's return were stacked up one after the other: he's a player's manager, he did a good job of managing the pitching staff throughout his time with the Jays, people around the team really liked him, especially Alex Anthopoulos, and he didn't necessarily get a 'fair shake' during his first tenure with the team because he didn't have the horses to win.
http://www.tsn.ca/blogs/jay_onrait/?id=409955
