Yes, he sounds like Texas, and many of his beliefs and attitudes are drawn from the Lone Star State, but Gibbons grew up all over the place, including Goose Bay, Labrador, where he played his first game of baseball on the grounds of a U.S. military base. His late father was a colonel in the Unites States Army. His mother, who is a character, speaks with an accent as strong as Gibbons’s, but originating somewhere in New England. (When they talk to each other, it’s quite the symphony…) The family settled in San Antonio during Gibbons’s formative years, and that’s where he excelled as a high-school athlete, where he was drafted by the New York Mets as their catcher-of-the-future, where he embarked on his long baseball journey, the playing part of which was ended by injury and hitting a ceiling, and the arrival at Shea Stadium of a guy named Gary Carter.

By 2011, Gibbons’s life had come full circle. Following his managerial term in Toronto, he’d been hired as a bench coach by the Kansas City Royals. That job ended when the manager, his old friend Trey Hillman, was let go. Now, he was back in San Antonio, having spent the previous season managing the local AA Texas League franchise. He lived a comfortable life with his wife and three children, and spent more nights in his own bed than he had since he was a teenager. His big-league prospects seemed finished, but there was no tragedy in that. Other things mattered more.

Then, out of the blue Alex Anthopoulos called, first to talk about a coaching gig, then to shock everyone — including Gibbons — by offering him the job of manager of the Toronto Blue Jays.

John Farrell, Anthopoulos’s signature hire, chosen following long rounds of interviews and personality tests, had left following the 2012 season for his “dream job” running the Boston Red Sox. The departure came at a bad time for an organization in the midst of a crisis of confidence that included the Yunel Escobar eye-black affair. Anthopoulos saw it as a betrayal, and took it particularly hard — so hard that trust, more than anything, prompted him to bring Gibbons back for a second term. Whatever else happened, Anthopoulos figured that at least he would have company in the fox hole, that he wouldn’t have to worry about being abandoned again.