Making history is one thing; recapturing it, another. In fact the only thing more difficult than recapturing history is making a break with it, as Toronto Blue Jays ownership has found out with Paul Beeston.

After 50-odd days of navigating their way through the tangled world of Major League Baseball’s internal political structure, Blue Jays ownership did the logical thing on Monday and punted, buying itself more time to find Beeston’s replacement as president and chief executive officer after spending almost two months in a leaky boat alongside Chicago White Sox’s owner Jerry Reinsdorf and Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos, two owners with competing agendas. Reinsdorf is a friend of Beeston’s; Angelos is at war with everybody in baseball over his regional television agreement with the Washington Nationals plus the perception that Major League Baseball pulled the 2016 All-Star Game out from under him.

This was never going to be easy.

Beeston — famous as the first employee hired by the Blue Jays in 1976 and, along with Pat Gillick, considered the architect of back-to-back World Series titles — has been president and CEO of the Blue Jays and Rogers Centre since 2009, when he replaced current Postmedia Network CEO and president Paul Godfrey. Beeston left the Blue Jays in 1997, working in the commissioner’s office as Bud Selig’s right-hand man until 2002, maintaining an office in Rogers Centre throughout.

Nobody has really known the nature of Beeston’s relationship with ownership – who his allies were or weren’t, to put it bluntly – but it would be in keeping with Beeston’s cigar-twirling, beer-drinking, hail-fellow-well-met persona that he would try to cajole his way around and through the various issues and demands that come with running a team owned by a publicly-traded company. Some times that works; some times – as in after the 2014 season – it doesn’t.

This past season was difficult for the Blue Jays in terms of optics. Television ratings were robust but attendance softened – bad timing with a ticket price increase in the works – and between an ill-fated and very public attempt to get players to defer money in Spring Training in order to sign Ervin Santana and kvetching about inactivity at the trade deadline by the likes of Casey Janssen and Jose Bautista, ownership was given ample reason to wonder about organizational discipline. That is, of course, when they weren’t wondering how a team with a payroll that was three-quarters of theirs – Dan Duquette’s Orioles – ran away with the American League East Division.

What seems clear is that more than anything an element of weariness crept into the relationship between ownership and Beeston after the disappointment of the 2013 season. Yet as he now goes into his final year – yes, that much we know is true – Beeston, just like his predecessor, Godfrey, deserves credit for roles played at particular times in franchise history.

Truth is, there are current and former Rogers board members who will tell you now that Godfrey was tailor-made for the president’s job after eight years of ownership by a Belgian-based brewery, Interbrew. That ownership was benign, faceless and had no interest in owning a baseball team or maintaining what was then known as SkyDome, an attitude that was quickly picked up on by Blue Jays fans. Godfrey has been a prominent face in Toronto political, social and sports circles seemingly forever; and while nobody spends as much time in those roles as Godfrey without collecting a wide swath of enemies and critics, Godfrey has made a trademark of being a kind of happy warrior, soldiering on and taking the slings and arrows and being very much out front at times of crisis and celebration. Godfrey was particularly effective in gently nudging Ted Rogers toward purchasing the SkyDome.

But it became necessary for Godfrey to move on once it became clear that general manager J.P. Ricciardi was going to eventually be replaced, and who better to replace him than Beeston – who in fact played a pivotal role in the sale of the Blue Jays to Rogers while he was in the commissioner’s office, by running interference for Phil Lind and others at Rogers, whom Beeston had identified early as the only group that could make baseball work in Toronto.

Just as Godfrey was a necessary hire at the time, so, too, was Beeston: the Blue Jays needed a fresh start after the Ricciardi years and several failed attempts to re-brand the team, and it had been so long since the team had won anything that turning the clock back 20 years seemed like a new start. What’s old is new, and vice-versa, and Beeston brought back an updated colour scheme and logo that owed much to the team’s glory years while talking big; he told the commissioner’s office the Blue Jays no longer needed currency equalization payments of $5 million per year – he might want to re-visit that in 2015 with the Canadian dollar tumbling, and wouldn’t you like to hear his conversation with new commissioner Rob Manfred, whose election Beeston opposed – and spoke boldly about the team as a big-market club just like it was back in the days when the Blue Jays had the highest payroll in baseball.

Best-case scenario now, of course, is that it is the players who end up writing the next chapter in Blue Jays history.