No need to tip toe around the issue. Feel free to flame me. I can take it when I'm wrong.
Although in all fairness to me what I said was that if he won back to back division titles there'd be interest in him. He sure doesn't look as good with his team failing.
What I liked about him the most was that he's a players manager and when things are going well that's fine. When they aren't it's a disaster like it was the other night when he let Martin talk him into staying in the game when he was clearly injured. It annoyed the hell out of me too, watching him yuk it up with Upton in the dugout after the fans rightfully booed him for not giving a crap. Like I said earlier, Upton should be benched for his play, not coddled. I can begrudgingly live with mistakes made by players who are trying and just aren't good enough. What we're seeing from Upton is just disinterest.
While I will admit Gibbons has made a lot of decisions I don't agree with, this isn't all on him. Atkins and Shapiro deserve just as much of the blame as he does, as well as the players. The players haven't been good enough, not much the manager can do about that. He's been shuffling the lineup like crazy trying to find a combination that works. I don't think there is one this year. I don't think it's his fault that his starting pitching, which has been the team's strength all year, is finally running out of gas. He can only run out the players he has on his roster.
As far as management goes, bringing in Upton has been a disaster. Whoever called him a cooler the other night was bang on. His play and effort suck the life out of the rest of the team. He's brought the exact opposite of what Revere brought last year. He was a spark plug that brought energy to the lineup, fired everybody else up. The guys on the team drop their heads and their shoulders slump watching him play. Should have been a red flag when a team that grossly underachieved this year wanted to pay most of the salary of a veteran to get rid of him. That's the difference right now between this regime and the way Anthopolous ran things. AA worked hard to figure out what type of character guys had before he brought them in. Doesn't look like enough due diligence was done before that deal was done.
Other blunders by management hurt this team too. Taking forever to figure out what to do with Sanchez might have soured some players. From the sounds of things it was the players that got management to reconsider. If management doesn't care about winning, the players stop too.
The other thing that I think has conspired against them is the impending free agency status of Bautista and Encarnacion with it being reported recently that it's unlikely either will be back. I think that's caused he players to lose steam lately, especially with those two as they haven't hit well at all for the last month, although Bautista's health hasn't helped him.
I agree though, with the team faltering down the stretch and a rebuild of sorts on the horizon that it's likely that Gibbons will be finished here. I just don't agree that it's all his fault.
