Arizona’s Kirk Gibson pulls no punches

Questions weren’t being asked. Or they weren’t being answered.

Whatever the reason, there was confusion.

Why did the Arizona Diamondbacks fire general manager Josh Byrnes and manager A.J. Hinch?

Owner Ken Kendrick pointed to their last-place record but never explained why he believed making a change at this point of the season would do anything. Team President Derrick Hall, a former Dodgers spokesman, talked and talked and said nothing of substance.

Interim General Manager Jerry DiPoto told everyone he was “very honest,” then avoided making any declarative statements about the team’s roster, particularly the putrid bullpen.

But everything changed when Kirk Gibson stepped to the dais.

In his first act Friday as the Diamondbacks’ interim manager, Gibson spoke clearly about himself, about his philosophy and about how what he was seeing from the team was unacceptable.

“I shouldn’t say this, but we have a lot of really good ballplayers,” said Gibson, who was promoted from his role of bench coach. “I’d rather have a lot of bad ballplayers who win ballgames.”

Gibson sounded a lot like Joe Torre when Torre took over the Dodgers three seasons ago. As Torre did about his young Dodgers then, Gibson said he wanted some of the Diamondbacks to change their swing-for-the-fences approach.

Mark Reynolds, Justin Upton and Chris Young are on pace for 30-home run seasons. They are also on pace to strike out well over 100 times each, with Reynolds already having hit the century mark. Upton began the game against the Dodgers on Saturday with 99 strikeouts.

“I used to strike out a lot,” Gibson said. “I used to be a pull hitter. But I changed. So my mentality is that you can change, that you can make adjustments if you choose to.”

Gibson implied the Diamondbacks were still immature, pointing out that they had to learn how to grind through a 162-game season, adding that he wouldn’t mind seeing the players display the kind of fire he showed as a player.

“To see a fiery team on the field, playing with fire, does not make me mad,” Gibson said.

Gibson didn’t show that side of himself in his 3 Âœ years as the Diamondbacks’ bench coach, as he was known to frequently horseplay with players in the clubhouse, punching them on their arms as he walked by or engaging them in grappling matches.

But Gibson repeatedly talked about how he approached the game as a player, perhaps a warning to the team that the lion within him could resurface if the players tested his patience.

Among the stories Gibson told was a well-known one about his first spring training with the Dodgers.

Accustomed to a serious team atmosphere with the Detroit Tigers, Gibson found the Dodgers’ clubhouse to be a “comedy store.”

The day the Dodgers played their first game of the exhibition season -- Gibson said he treated it as if it were the seventh game of the World Series -- reliever Jesse Orosco rubbed eye black inside of Gibson’s cap as a joke. When Gibson removed his cap to wipe his brow, the eye black spread all over his arm. His teammates were laughing.

That prompted Gibson to leave the team for the day and meet with it the following day. Gibson told them about himself.

“I told them, ‘I’m the best teammate you’ll ever have, you just don’t realize it yet,’ ” he said. “From that point on, we went out there and got after it. We were world champions and nobody picked us to do so.”

dylan.hernandez@latimes.com