Here’s John Gibbons in one backroom anecdote.

It’s the start of the ’08 season.

We’re sitting around jawing in the visiting manager’s office at old Yankee Stadium. Gibbons’ time as manager is growing short. He knows it. We know it. But we’re all trying to pretend this isn’t the beginning of the end.

We start talking about something we’ve all seen in the New York Times that morning — an attempt by a mathematician and baseball fan to metricize the performance of big-league managers.

“How’d I do?” Gibbons asks.

“You were sixth,” someone says.

A smile begins hauling up the sides of Gibbons’ face like sails being raised on a longship. A comic beat passes.

“In the American League East,” someone else says.

The smile collapses. The room quiets, turning uncertainly to the guy who delivered the zinger. Then Gibbons bends forward in his chair and begins to laugh. He is rocking back and forth, delighted. No one appreciates a John Gibbons joke more than John Gibbons.

(It should be noted that he was sixth. In all of baseball.)

Gibbons was the first manager I ever covered. I didn’t realize at the time how unusual he was — his candour, his humour, his lack of ego, his warmth. No one in baseball is warm. Everyone’s too terrified it will be mistaken for weakness. Gibbons gives it off like a furnace.

Like all hot-blooded people, he was occasionally combustible. I remember in particular a shrieking exchange with the Star’s baseball columnist Richard Griffin in Cleveland. That office in Cleveland is a utility closet with a desk. There were a dozen of us packed in there as Grif and Gibby went at it, twisting back and forth like spectators at the world’s tiniest tennis match.

After Grif had stormed out, another veteran journo quietly told Gibbons that he’d been in the wrong. I remember Grif’s surprise later when he said that Gibbons had sought him out to apologize. Nobody really apologizes in baseball. Back to the point about weakness.

All people ever talk about with Gibbons are the shoving matches — not fights, shoving matches — with Shea Hillenbrand and Ted Lilly. That was used, understandably, to paint Gibbons as a not-all-that-bantam rooster, someone looking for an excuse. Let’s say this about that — if you find yourself in a physical altercation with John Gibbons, you were asking for it. And then let’s say no more.

What does not get talked about with John Gibbons is the respect he enjoyed from the rest of the room (i.e. with the non-crazies).

“I like working with him and I like him,” Roy Halladay once said of Gibbons, which is the equivalent of a kiss on the lips.

What does not get talked about is how well Gibbons handled the pitching staff. A baseball manager really has only one baseball job — handling the staff. The rest is noise.

In 2004, when Gibbons was hired as a late-in-the-season surprise caretaker to succeed Carlos Tosca, the Jays finished 11th in the American League in team ERA.

During the four-or-so years of Gibbons’ tenure, the staff finished, in order, 6th, 5th, 2nd and 1st.

How’ve they done since they fired him half-way through ’08?

They’ve receded to performance norms — never better than 10th. That’s a single-statistic rationale right there.

Just holding A.J. Burnett’s hilltop Three Faces of Eve routine together should have earned the man a civic citation.

Instead, we spent most of those years waiting for him to leave. His crime was two-fold.

He had the temerity to rise up from bullpen catcher to manager, hauled up from there by a pal. So classism, in the first instance.

And second, he didn’t look or sound like what many think a baseball manager should look and sound like. He’s a mumbler. He’s got a twang. After years spent behind the plate, he’s got a little hitch in his stride.

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“For some reason, I’m viewed as a hick, a hillbilly, whatever that is,” Gibbons once said. “That’s not who I am. But because I talk a little different or walk a little different, that’s life. I was born that way.”

So snobbery, in the second instance.

And yet, Gibbons wants to come back.

He had a chance during those years in the relative wilderness to interview for the managing job with the New York Mets, the team he came up with. He turned it down.

Also consider this: GM Alex Anthopoulos knows Gibbons well from his time as J.P. Ricciardi’s assistant. He has gone all-in this off-season. If Gibbons blows this opportunity, it’s Anthopoulos’s job as well.

Had he chosen a stranger, made a pro forma “baseball” choice, he might have enough distance to save himself. By choosing a friend, Anthopoulos is putting his own professional future in that man’s hands. That’s a powerful character reference.

Of all the moves made by the Jays this fall, this is the one that gives me the most hope. It’s proof that this club is doing something more than stockpiling talent. It’s working toward a vision of what this team should represent — class, integrity, and joy in the game. Never underestimate joy. It’s a powerful motivator. It’s been sorely lacking in the Jays’ clubhouse since Gibbons left, and the results of that have shown in the standings.

That he’s back as Blue Jays manager is an opportunity for reconsideration – not by us of him, but by him of us. We didn’t appreciate him nearly enough the first time around. After the ashen taste left by John Farrell’s departure, what we wanted most of all was someone who considered working with this team in this city his dream job.

For all the reasons listed above, no-one better fits that bill than Gibbons. He isn’t the prodigal son. He’s the other one — the one who kept faith with home.

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