Cito Gaston Still Won’t Take Credit for Blue Jays Making the Playoffs

OAKLAND, Calif. —  The thing that bothers Cito Gaston about this job is that radio stations and newspapers call him at 7 o’clock in the morning when he’s sleeping. “How would you like it if they woke you up?” he said.

Well, there are only four managers getting unrequested wake-up calls these days, something most of the others would consider a blessing. But then Gaston didn’t ask for this job. And he says he isn’t so sure he wants to do it again next year.

But he took over the Blue Jays, those annual disappointments, when they were floundering in May and here he is managing in the American League playoffs. He thought the Blue Jays would be here from the early days of spring training, but he thought Jimy Williams would be managing them and Gaston would be hitting coach as he’d been since 1982.

There are players who would say that the fact that Gaston is managing and the Blue Jays are here is cause and effect. Gaston does not. “I don’t see what I had to do with it,” he said.

He will defend Williams. He did not get a phone call of congratulations from Williams. “Maybe he tried to call and I wasn’t around,” Gaston said.

It is not Gaston’s style to be demonstrative, but then that may be his great asset. The change from Williams to Gaston was like the classic bad cop-good cop contrast.

“The difference was amazing,” said Tom Lawless, a veteran utility infielder and a talented observer, who saw how it was done in two championships with the Cardinals. What he saw of the Blue Jays under Williams was a dark cloud in the clubhouse and on the field.

“I didn’t see it,” Gaston said. “To me, I thought the players were real close to Jimy.”

The Blue Jays had won 12 and lost 24 when Williams was dismissed. The organization asked Gaston to be interim manager while they tried to get Lou Piniella. Gaston said he wasn’t interested. It wasn’t, he said, that he wanted to be named manager because he didn’t want that, either.

“They said it wouldn’t be more than four or five days or two weeks,” Gaston said. “I told them, ‘Make sure you don’t take too long.”’

He’d seen the change in Williams’ life when he went from third base coach to manager. “All of a sudden he was making the lineup,” Gaston said. “He had been friends with the players, just like I was.

“It didn’t change Jimy; it changed with other people. I didn’t want that to happen to me.”

He was saying it was more important to him to keep his relationship with the players than to find the ego satisfaction of managing. “Then I heard the players wanted me around,” Gaston said.

George Steinbrenner wouldn’t release Piniella to Toronto, the Blue Jays had begun to respond and Gaston got the job.

He had made all the stops in his own playing career. He went from regular to platoon to extra man to pinch hitter. He understood the nature of all those jobs and of playing every day. That’s what Lawless noted in the contrast.

“He understood that losses go with the wins, hand in hand,” Lawless said. “They weren’t playing for Jimy. When he left, it took the pressure off. Players had been afraid to make a mistake.”

It was Williams’ dictum that players had to stew in their lockers if they’d lost a game. “I don’t mind if I see someone smiling in a corner after we’ve lost a game,” Gaston said.

“The difference is in how they lost,” Lawless said. “They became different guys. Before that, you could feel the tension. Guys come to the park wanting to play. Before they were just going out there.”

Gaston’s manner is to take his place in the manager’s corner of the dugout, then slide down the bench to sit with the young players. He’ll go back to his command post and if something comes up in the ball game, he’ll slide back to the kids again. “The guys here honestly love him,” said Mookie Wilson, who dropped in from the Mets in time to play a role in Gaston being here.

By being here, Gaston is the first black to manage in post-season play. Someday that distinction may no longer be a distinction. At the moment it is, but Cito Gaston would play it down. He would put it far down in the story.