You have to wonder what it takes to get fired in Canada.

There are a lot of bad managers in baseball right now, ranging from those like Chicago’s Dusty Baker, who have clear strengths and weaknesses that just aren’t well-suited to their present situations, to those like Kansas City’s Buddy Bell who have amply proven themselves bad at running a major league baseball team. Toronto’s John Gibbons, though, absolutely has to be the worst. Winning teams usually don’t fire their managers in late August, but the Blue Jays really should.

How a manager affects a ballclub is one of the things we most poorly understand about baseball. It’s almost impossible for anyone to separate out a manager’s contribution to success from that of the front office, that of coaches, that of the players themselves, and that of blind luck, and because we don’t know how much impact managers have, it’s difficult to draw up any criteria to judge them by. Tony LaRussa and Bobby Cox, it’s pretty clear, are good managers; Bell, it’s pretty clear, is a bad one; past that, it’s hard to say much with any confidence. Hopefully, though, we can all agree that in 2006 any manager who not only helms an expensive, underperforming ballclub but gets into two separate physical confrontations with players should get the boot.

While no one’s quite sure what went on between Gibbons and Blue Jays pitcher Ted Lilly Monday night, the gist seems to be this: After Lilly, with an eight-run lead, coughed up seven runs to the A’s in the third inning, he refused to give the manager the ball when Gibbons went out to the mound to take him out of the game. When Lilly finally left the mound, he went through the Jays’ dugout into the tunnel leading to the locker room. Gibbons followed him and came out with a bloody nose. Lilly vociferously denies punching the skipper in the schnozz, but the manager did chew him out on the mound and did go after him.

A presumably impartial witness, a photographer for the Candian Press, told the Associated Press that “Gibbons just went at him. It looked like Gibbons grabbed him and they disappeared.… It was mayhem down in the tunnel.”

One is free to suppose that Gibbons might have, say, chased Lilly down into the tunnel to talk about muffin recipes, tripped, and fallen on his face, thus bloodying his nose. Even so, one would have to find it a bit curious that in this situation, Gibbons found it difficult to get his starter to give him the ball. Who’s heard of such a thing? And what kind of manager chases a player into a tunnel and grabs him, even if it’s only to let him know before he hits the shower that Mrs. Lilly’s suggestion to add a touch of vanilla when making banana-nut muffins was a hit around the Gibbons household?

This is, of course, fresh off last month’s incident in which Gibbons challenged Jays infielder Shea Hillenbrand to a fight after finding out he’d written “The ship is sinking” on a clubhouse blackboard. “He had a chance yesterday to defend himself in front of his coaches and his teammates. He chose not to,” Gibbons told reporters the day after the incident, which ended up in Hillenbrand being traded to San Francisco.

Who talks like this? Gibbons is a grown man. Baseball isn’t law or medicine, and you certainly hold baseball managers to a different standard than the one to which you’d hold, say, newspaper editors, but challenging a subordinate to a fistfight in front of your staff and his fellow employees is just about most immature behavior imaginable. It’s the sort of thing only someone who knows he deserves no respect whatsoever does. Which is perfectly in line with Gibbons not even being able to get his starting pitcher to give him the ball when he goes out to the mound.

Whatever we know and don’t know about managers, challenging players to fistfights, posturing about it in the press, and chasing them around is the sign of a clueless fool. And while you can’t pin it all on Gibbons, you have to wonder how much his blustery act is to blame for Toronto not being in second place. Given their run differential (they’d scored 647 and allowed 615 at the beginning of last night’s game), you’d expect them to be 3.5 games out of the wild card spot right now; instead they’re 7.5 behind, and realistically out of the race.

I cannot necessarily pinpoint what makes a manager good, but I know that Gibbons’s antics have no place in baseball, and if Bud Selig were alive he’d be doing something about this. It’s an embarrassment. “I overreacted, no question about that,” Gibbons told a Toronto radio station yesterday. “I can’t run from that, I can’t make excuses. I’ve got to live with it now.” He sounded like a six-year-old, proud of himself for taking accountability for inexcusable stupidity. If he had the sense of self-awareness most 6-year-olds have, he’d have quit already. Fortunately, he’s not the only one who can decide whether he keeps his job.