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Toronto Blue Jays' Vladimir Guerrero Jr. celebrates his walk-off home run to defeat the St. Louis Cardinals during a spring training game in Montreal, on March 27, 2018.Paul Chiasson/The Canadian Press

Back in the mid-90s, the Montreal Expos sent their organizational saviour – Vladimir Guerrero (no ‘Sr.’ yet required) − to play for a AA-affiliate in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Guerrero was a 20-year-old Dominican phenomenon, the sort few had seen live, but everyone had heard of. He spoke not one word of English. People talked about the roughness of his game – the finer points still escaped him – and the way the ball exploded off his bat.

One teammate in particular understood the challenges ahead – Charlie Montoyo.

Montoyo had also come to America (from Puerto Rico) with no English. He taught himself while he went to college. He’d been drafted late, traded to Montreal and appeared briefly for them at the highest level. His only major-league highlight was a pinch-hit game winner on his first at-bat

Though Montoyo didn’t have anything close to Guerrero’s natural ability, he’d made a life in baseball. At 30, he was near the end, but still plugging in the minor leagues, the oldest guy in the clubhouse.

“I’ve been there,” Montoyo told a reporter at the time about what Guerrero was facing. “He has to keep doing what he’s doing, letting his bat do the talking.”

That worked out pretty well. By the end of his career, Guerrero still wasn’t terribly comfortable in English, but that bat had talked its owner’s way into the Hall of Fame.

By then, Montoyo was less than a footnote in Guerrero’s career. He’d moved into the fringes of the coaching world. He’d spend nearly 20 years bouncing from small town to small town, just as he always had.

But it’s funny the things that can happen if you stick around long enough. You may get to watch history repeat itself.

On Thursday, Montoyo, 53, was named the new manager of the Toronto Blue Jays.

Last year, he was the Tampa Bay Rays bench coach. Before that, he was the third-base coach. Before that, he was in Alabama, both Carolinas (most famously with the Durham Bulls) and the San Joaquin Valley.

If a place has a baseball team, Charlie Montoyo probably worked there. Some people are lifers. Montoyo’s a man of the cloth. He’s never been out of uniform.

Until quite recently, the done thing for a team in trouble was to hire a famous name as manager. It settled the locals and gave even the worst club some sense of purpose. That’s gone out of fashion recently.

Rookie manager Alex Cora is about to lead the Boston Red Sox to a world championship. Cora was a decent player, but got the job after spending just one year as the bench coach of the Houston Astros. That was the sum total of his coaching experience.

If it’s a time for outsiders, Montoyo might be the most emblematic of the bunch. He wasn’t a star when he played. He didn’t study under one of the game’s grand poobahs.

Until today, most fans in Toronto (or anywhere outside Florida) had probably never heard of him.

That gives him the advantage of a blank slate. Unlike, say, a Buck Showalter, it’s hard to say where this is headed.

Montoyo has a few jobs on tap. He has to remake a major-league team in his image; take control of the system from top to bottom; begin a years-long rebuilding process; and find a way in the interim to play baseball that may be bad, but isn’t embarrassing.

He’s never had to do any of those things, and certainly not in a market as reactionary as Toronto’s.

The bona fide you can pinpoint at the outset reaches back to those days in Harrisburg – he’d been there when a kid named Guerrero found his footing. Presumably, he helped.

Nobody wants to put too much pressure on the Jays’ organizational saviour, Vlad Guerrero Jr., but let’s face it – there’s a whole lot of pressure. If he is a bust, the major reason for Blue Jays optimism blows off like morning mist.

This can be a work in progress, but it does have to work. It has to start working next season.

Guerrero Jr. will arrive in April very much like his father did – 20 years old, little facility in English, a shaky command of baseball’s finer points and a bat that puts him in the same comparative boat with Barry Bonds and Willie Mays.

Montoyo’s main task is helping Guerrero begin making the adjustment from Next Big Thing to Current Big Thing. And then he’s got 24 other guys to worry about.

If it’s a risk, this is the right time to take it. The Jays aren’t going anywhere in the near term. Nobody expects them to win much, or at all. The 2019 season could be historically terrible in terms of losses.

An established manager might feel pressure to do more right away. Since there is no benchmark to be met, Montoyo has the luxury of patience.

But his team does need to start lighting a path toward the future. Guerrero is the key beacon. If he does well, or even just okay, people will be satisfied.

Managing a bad major-league team is a thankless job. It plods on relentlessly for seven months and gets worse as it gets nearer the end.

But at least Montoyo’s initial marching order is simple – get one guy’s bat talking.

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