Blue Jays manager John Gibbons sat in the cramped office underneath Yankee Stadium staring hard at the computer. On the screen was a diagram constructed by mathematician and baseball nut Steve Wang. The figures shown, called "Chernoff faces," take statistical data and reflect them in the form of facial expressions. Wang used the method to create exaggerated, elfin portraits of all 30 current big league managers based on their baseball tendencies. Houston Astros boss Phil Garner's "face" looked deliriously happy. Tigers manager Jim Leyland looked aghast.

Gibbons studied his own Chernoff face for some time. Then he asked no one in particular, "What is that (expression)? Puzzled?"

Gibbons' actual face then lit up with childish delight. Nobody likes sticking it to John Gibbons quite as much as John Gibbons. That way, he beats everyone else to the punch.

Six games in, the mood of Blue Jays fans is cautiously buoyant and unusually charitable toward the team's manager. Gibbons knows how long that can last. His own motto, often repeated, is "Never too high, never too low."

The manager keeps it even, but his critics don't. Doubts have dogged him during his four years in charge in Toronto. Gibbons has been portrayed as underqualified and overwhelmed. He's been cast as the dugout puppet manipulated by minor-league roommate and club GM J.P. Ricciardi.

There's little doubt that Ricciardi maintains ultimate authority over team and personnel decisions. But when a call needs to be made during the games, Gibbons makes it.

"I think he was destined to be a manager," said new bench coach Brian Butterfield. "Our club responds to him. All the coaches want to run through a wall for him."

To a man, the players refer to him only with praise. "I like working with him and I like him," Roy Halladay has said. That's as close as it gets to the final word.

Gibbons, 45, is entering his fourth full season as manager. It's been an unlikely journey from bullpen catcher to Carlos Tosca's mid-season replacement to mainstay during a turbulent rearming process.

Gibbons holds a 274-268 record in that time. In early August, he should surpass Bobby Cox's 647 games in charge. That would make him the second longest tenured Toronto manager in team history, behind Cito Gaston's remarkable 1,319 games at the helm.

"I never gave it much thought," the San Antonio, Texas, resident said of the coming milestone.

With off-season additions bolstering the left side of the infield, with a pitching staff that Yankee star Johnny Damon recently called "probably the best ' top to bottom ' in the game," Gibbons must deliver in 2008.

Last year at this time, he was given a $650,000 (U.S.) extension to cover this season. There has been no extension this spring. The message is fairly clear ' if this team stumbles early, it will be Gibbons' head on the block.

"If you view our last couple of years as total failures, and I'm speaking about me personally, then I can see why you think I'm under the gun under the circumstances. The nature of professional sports is that you can't plod along, plod along. At some point you have to break through," Gibbons said.

Gibbons' late-inning pitching substitutions have attracted microscopic attention. When they work, it often passes without mention. When they don't, he's pilloried.

"People want you to use the same (pitchers) every night. Then they turn around and blame you for hurting them," Gibbons said.

"We were second in the league in pitching (last season). If you want to say that I can't handle the pitching staff, well you know, you can't have it both ways."

Often perceived as bumptious, Gibbons is a keen conversationalist in private, especially when it comes to politics. This spring, baseball chats with the manager usually began with a debate about the day's news from the U.S. presidential primaries. In Gibbons' view, his true image has not filtered down to the public.

"For some reason I'm viewed as a hick, a hillbilly, whatever that is," Gibbons said. "That's not who I am. But because I talk a little different or walk a little different, that's life. I was born that way."

The son of a U.S. Air Force colonel, Gibbons likes to cast things in military terms. Asked about how much losing this job would hurt him, he turns to the familiar.

"There's brave men and women around the world dying for what you and I live for. That helps keep things in perspective. It's a business, it's a game, it's our profession. It's very, very important. But in the grand scheme of things," and here he pauses, shrugs and smiles. "You know what I mean."

Unsaid, because it would be bad luck, is the satisfaction he would earn by sticking it to his critics this year with a breakout season.

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