T.O.'s retro sports

First the Toronto Maple Leafs hired Cliff Fletcher for a second go-around, 11 years after his first stint as the club's general manager ended. Now the Toronto Blue Jays signal their nostalgia for the glory years of the early 90s by bringing back Cito Gaston to manage the baseball club. All we need now is for the Raptors to bring back Isiah Thomas to run the basketball team into the ground and harass employees  and it'll be 1995 all over again. 

What's notable about Gaston's hiring is that, despite winning back-to-back World Series titles with Toronto in 1992 and 1993, he was never hired as manager by any other club after leaving the Jays in 1997. Which is baffling, considering the number of managers that have been hired and rehired over that period without ever reaching Gaston's level of success.

Why was this? It's tempting to point to race, but Major League Baseball teams have shown more willingness to hire black managers in the past few years (Dusty Baker, the recently-fired Willie Randolph, etc) - although the number of non-white managers and general managers still doesn't reflect the ethnic diversity on the field. So while race might have been an issue in some cases, there were likely other factors. Maybe he had a reputation for being difficult to work with, or for not working well with young players (Gaston won a ton with a star-studded roster, but started to flounder when the Jays shed payroll after their second championship). 

It could just be that Gaston wasn't the right man at the right time for the jobs that came up. But after 11 years and dozens of managerial changes, is it really possible that not one club thought a guy with two World Series rings was the best available choice? Weird.