Each day during the season, save for Sundays, reporters gather in John Gibbons’ office for a pregame gabfest. We begin by seeking his insights about his team — the status of Aaron Sanchez’s wonky finger, the shape of Ryan Borucki’s slider, how Thomas Pannone gets away with throwing such a lazy fastball, why Russ Martin is rotting on the bench in September and what to do about the defence of Teoscar Hernandez.



More often than not, the talk about the Blue Jays begins to flag after 10 minutes or so, and after an awkward silence, someone takes the manager on an entertaining tangent. So it was on Sept. 22, before Gibbons managed the last Saturday home game of his Toronto tenure, when a reporter asked him a question about the ball parks where he played as a Mets prospect in the 1980s.



He began with Shelby, North Carolina.



“Hellby, we called it,” he said, unleashing his familiar infectious guffaw.



The team played on a bad...