The Cito Gaston era brought better days for Blue Jays fans

The manager's job opened up for Cito Gaston just as it always does in baseball somebody else got fired.

On May 15, 1989, the Blue Jays fired Jimy Williams after the team had put together a 12-24 record.

General Manager Pat Gillick said the team had high hopes when Williams took the job three seasons earlier.

"We thought Jimy was maturing as a manager, we thought that he was fitting into the [manager's] seat very well, but sometimes the best-laid plans, they don't work out," he told reporters after firing Williams.

To fill the manager's job, the team looked to Gaston to take over on an interim basis.

Will Cito stay?

Will Cito Gaston stick as manager?

36 years ago

Duration 1:12

Marty York talks to Midday about the odds of Cito Gaston taking on the Jays' manager job on a permanent basis.

Gaston had been the team's hitting coach since 1982and was well-liked by players.And after one day on the job, the team was 1-0 under his watch.

But some doubted he'd be able to hang onto his new role for very long.

"I think Cito is a capable man. He does command the respect of the players I think he can motivate them he knows baseball and I would like to see them remove that interim tag," sports journalist Marty York told CBC's Midday the day after Gaston had been named manager.

"But from my understanding, the only way they're going to do that is if he should win every game during his stint as interim manager. I don't think that's going to happen."

The Toronto Star was just as bleak in its assessment. The paper reported the Jays would name a permanent manager within 10 days but said "Gaston isn't on the short list of candidates."

By the end of April, the team announced Gaston would be keeping his job until the end of the season.

'No sense in worrying'

The Jays under Gaston, in fact, would continue to improve through the 1989 season. And as the end got closer with a possible, but still uncertain playoff bid in sightthe pressure didn't seem to be getting to their manager.

"There's no sense in worrying about things that are in the past ... being concerned about 'em is only going to cause you aproblem as far as worrying about 'em," Gaston told CBC, just a few days before the season wrapped.

"To me, at this time of year, you want to just stay asrelaxed as you possibly can and not worry about things that happened two days ago or last night because that's over with and you can't do anything about it."

Toronto finishedwith an 89-73 record, winning the division on the second-last game of the regular-season schedule.

And that meant the Jays would play in their first playoff series in four years.

The Blue Jays wouldn't make it to the World Series that year, as the Oakland Athletics defeated them in just five games in the American League Championship Series.

But the Jayswould make repeated and highly memorable trips to the post-season in the years to come.

2 World Series championships

From 1991 to 1993, the Jayswould win three further division titles under Gaston. The team also wonback-to-back World Series championships in 1992 and 1993.

Gaston would continue to manage the Jays until the last weekof the 1997 season.

He made a comeback in 2008, when he took on his old job after John Gibbons, then in his own first stint as a big-league manager,was fired by the Jays.

The team was 35-39 when Gaston took over. They finished their season with an 86-76 record.

Just like the first time around, Gaston was hired on an interim basis. But he would end up managing the team through the end of the 2010 season.

His career record as Blue Jays manager through two stints and 1,764 games stands at 913-851, according to statistics listed on the team's website.

To date, no other manager has taken a Blue Jays team to the World Series and no one has spent more games or won more gamesas the Toronto bench bossthanGastonhas.