A year ago today, the Blue Jays had the press conference introducing John Gibbons as manager and I talked about his first stint with the Jays.
One of the things I said was 'he doesn't bunt much'. Well, that was true in the past. This past year we had 29 sac bunts, just under the AL average of 31. Baseball Reference has us successful 67% of the time, right at league average. . A lot of it was the personnel he had. Munenori Kawasaki had 10 bunts. Personally I thought he had Kawasaki bunt too often. Munenori would run the pitch count, and got on base reasonably well. But, I'm really not a fan of the bunt.
I said he didn't give out a lot of intentional walks. Well, again that might have been true before, but the Jays handed out 33 intentional walks, 6th in the AL. League average was 30. The Red Sox had the league low with 10. I hate the intentional walk.
Beyond that, I thought he did ok with the bullpen, though, considering the number of good arms we had out there, it wasn't that hard. I'd suggest that Steve Delabar shouldn't pitch more than an inning ever.
He was willing to try things with the batting order. I thought Jose Bautista batting second was inspired, though he didn't seem to sell Jose on the idea. If you are going to do something like that, you really should explain it to the player, and get him on your side. With all the injuries, there was a fair bit of playing around with the batting order.
I did think he would be a little stronger with the discipline. After the pretty loose ship we had with the last manager (I forget his name), I thought that Gibby would be ruling with an iron hand, and that didn't seem to happen. I did expect him to less tolerant with mistakes than he was. There were too many moments of mental errors. I know it is a lot to expect of a manager to clean all that up in a season, but still, I expected more.
I do see a lot of complaints about Gibby, mostly on Twitter and mainstream media comment sections, people figuring the manager should be able to win regardless of what's happening with the players. With the mess we had in 2013, I can't see blaming the manager for terrible season.
Anyway, a year in, what do you think about Gibby as manager?