John Gibbons has support of players: DeRosa

He is the voice of experience in the Toronto Blue Jays dressing room. His knowledge of the game is unparalleled. He has seen it all.

So when you ask Mark DeRosa if he agrees with Blue Jays General Manager Alex Anthopoulos, who recently insisted John Gibbons will return as manager, he wastes no time in responding.

“I completely agree 100 percent with him,” said DeRosa. “We’ve had a lot of things since spring training happen to this ball club that John had no part in.”

DeRosa went on to say, “Gibby is a players’ manager. Everybody in here to a man has completely enjoyed playing for him. He’s given us a long leash probably a little longer than to be expected based on the way we played. I’ve completely enjoyed playing for him.”

DeRosa has had a big influence on Brett Lawrie and his improvement in recent weeks. He has become a mentor to the Blue Jays third baseman.

He’s also direct when asked what went wrong this year.
 

“Everybody has their own little piece of the fault as to why we are in the place we are at,” said the 38 year-old. “I definitely don’t feel that Gibby should be the scapegoat for it at all.”

The struggles of the starting staff, at-times atrocious defence, and poor fundamentals are all reasons why the Jays have so badly under achieved this season.

Gibbons acknowledges more teaching needs to be done. He probably was too laid back in that area because he thought he had a veteran team that didn’t need to be taught. He was wrong.

DeRosa for his part credits Gibbons with keeping the team loose during a trying season and not losing the clubhouse.

“You got to have pride in yourself and be willing to compete and do whatever it takes that night,” said DeRosa. “You find the true colors of people when things are going bad. It could have been easy for us to disband in the clubhouse and we haven’t. We’ve stayed strong, we stayed together.”

And with the bulk of the team expected back next season, DeRosa hopes the lessons learned this season will be used to turn things around next season,

“We understand the reasons we are where we are. It’s disappointing coming off a spring training where I felt like we had such a swagger about us and so confident, to find ourselves in this situation is obviously not a good one but we better learn from it.