In late February 2015, Gabe Kapler, then the Dodgers’ director of player development, received two emails: The first came from a woman who told him that her 17-year-old granddaughter had been beaten up in the Arizona hotel room of one of Kapler’s players the night before. Another email from the girl herself, reiterating the story, followed soon after. The girl had been drinking with two Dodgers minor leaguers and two other women at the Glendale Hampton Inn when the two women beat her up. One of the players was passed out drunk, and the other, instead of intervening, recorded video of the attack and uploaded it to Snapchat.
Rather than reporting the incident to police, Kapler attempted to set up a dinner between the 17-year-old and his two players, according to The Washington Post. “This dinner is our initiative,” Kapler wrote to the grandmother in an email. “We will ensure [the girl’s] safety. We believe we can teach valuable lessons to all involved through this method of follow up.”
About a week later, according to the Post’s report, the girl told police that one of the Dodgers players sexually assaulted her before she was beaten. Kapler, who’s now entering his second season as manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, told the Post he was not aware of the alleged sexual assault when he tried to arrange the sit-down between the players and the girl, a claim he repeated in a post on his own personal blog published on Saturday.
Three days later, on Tuesday, Sports Illustrated reported that Kapler and other members of the Dodgers’ player development staff were aware of two other incidents at the same hotel: in October 2015, when a Dodgers minor leaguer was “accused of an act of sexual violence against a woman on the housekeeping staff,” and the following spring, when a group of players, including a top prospect not named in the SI report, were caught on surveillance video confronting female guests—“stalking ... and behaving strangely,” to use the words of a source quoted by SI. None of these incidents were reported to MLB, which only learned about them in 2017 when one of Kapler’s former assistants, Nick Francona, went to the league. In August 2015, MLB and the MLBPA instituted a policy requiring teams to inform the league of all potential acts of domestic violence, sexual assault, or child abuse by anyone within the organization, which means the Dodgers violated league policy by failing to report the October 2015 incident. Kapler did, according to emails obtained by SI, talk to the hotel manager in the aftermath of the alleged sexual assault of the housekeeper.
Any one of these revelations would be troubling on its own, and taken together they constitute a pattern of behavior, painting a picture of a Dodgers front office whose primary concern is to protect the team and its players. Kapler might be telling the truth when he says he didn’t know about the sexual assault allegations stemming from the February 2015 incident, but he did know that a girl was harmed while one of his players stood by and filmed it, and he definitely knew about the sexual assault allegations from October 2015. In both cases, he attempted to deal with it without involving any outside authority, either within baseball or without.
The recent reports about Kapler trying to keep these events within the organization are the most serious accusations of professional misconduct levied against Kapler and the Dodgers, but not the first. This past October, Sports Illustrated reported that the Department of Justice was investigating the Dodgers for potential violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act while recruiting amateur players from Latin America. Kapler has not commented on the DOJ investigation, nor did Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman.
In May 2017, Jeff Passan, then of Yahoo Sports, reported that Francona had claimed that the Dodgers discriminated against him and that MLB was investigating the claim. Francona, a Marine Corps veteran, wrote a letter to the league office saying that the Dodgers gradually pushed him out after he sought an evaluation for traumatic brain injury (TBI) at Home Base, a Boston-based veterans center. In that letter, Francona was especially harsh on Kapler, his direct superior with the Dodgers. Francona wrote that Kapler claimed to support him publicly but was pushing for Francona to be removed from the player development department because he went to be assessed for TBI.
According to published excerpts from Kapler’s emails and the blog post, Kapler viewed the 2015 allegations of criminal behavior as teaching moments. Kapler said part of the reason he attempted to arrange a meeting between the two players and the survivor of the February 2015 alleged assault was “to educate the players on how to be accountable.”
Despite MLB’s efforts to combat domestic violence and sexual assault within the sport, its response to stories that involve violence against women tends to concern the player first. What can the player learn? Is he sorry? When can he return to the field? Perhaps there’s a suspension, maybe an apology, but the needs of the survivor usually take a back seat to the need of the sport to put the matter behind it. This attitude is not unique to Kapler or to the Dodgers; it’s pervasive, and it’s one of the biggest impediments to MLB instituting a truly constructive approach toward preventing or responding to such acts of violence.
Nevertheless, the Phillies, Kapler’s current employer, ought to think long and hard about whether they want Kapler to continue as the face of their team. Kapler is already one of baseball’s most visible and controversial managers, for reasons ranging from his fitness regimen to his unorthodox bullpen management and lineup construction, but these are trivial issues compared to his handling of the three incidents at the Glendale Hampton Inn.
In his blog post, Kapler repeated that he did not know about the February 2015 sexual assault allegation when he tried to arrange the meeting between the players and the 17-year-old girl who said she was beaten up and sexually violated in their presence.
“There is a big difference between responding to a player who displayed an unacceptable lack of judgment and one that assaulted a woman,” Kapler wrote. “I am well aware of that difference, and I assure you that I would have acted differently if at the time I was involved I had reason to believe that a sexual assault had occurred.”
The phrase “displayed an unacceptable lack of judgment” sticks out. Even if he didn’t know a sexual assault allegation existed, Kapler should have been more thoughtful in the way he handled the situation. With a little research and self-evaluation, Kapler could have discovered that he was trying to fill a role best left to someone with training in social work, law enforcement, or any number of disciplines other than coaching baseball. Or that his offer of a private meeting between his players and the 17-year-old was reminiscent of the meeting between Ray Rice, his wife, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, and various Ravens officials eight months before—a meeting that was denounced as potentially coercive to a survivor of intimate partner violence. Kapler should have taken more concerted steps to address this incident and prevent future ones before they happened.
And when these failings came to light, Kapler certainly shouldn’t have posted a 1,340-word essay on his blog about how he was right all along. Nowhere in his post did Kapler apologize for his handling of the February 2015 claim. And even though he insisted that “I take violence against women, especially sexual violence, incredibly seriously,” Kapler didn’t square that assertion with his actions—at the time of the blog post, the public didn’t know about the reported sexual assault of a hotel housekeeper, but Kapler did. And there’s no indication in the post that Kapler has re-evaluated his actions since then or made an attempt to educate himself on how to do better next time.
It’s fair to question the judgment of a person who behaved as Kapler did, and wonder whether it’s wise to retain a manager who’s displayed an unacceptable lack of judgment in a position where he’s tasked with molding the culture of a baseball team, and let him continue to be one of the organization’s most visible public-facing employees.
The Dodgers should also be held responsible as an organization—Kapler, in his blog post, said that when the grandmother asked him for financial assistance, “I felt a request of this nature was above my paygrade. I shared this information with people within the Dodgers.” Whom did he tell? How far up the company ladder was this decision made? If Kapler ends up as the sole fall guy for how these situations were handled, and only after he’s already left the team, the Dodgers will have essentially escaped scot-free. The Dodgers must account for their actions publicly, and if they don’t, MLB should compel them to. Otherwise there will be no incentive for change.
Firing Kapler wouldn’t fix baseball’s inability to handle its players’ frequently toxic relationship toward women—Kapler’s actions are the result of the sport’s culture in addition to his own unsound thought process. But there has to be a coach out there somewhere who can write out a lineup card and hold a clubhouse together who hasn’t displayed such a shocking lack of good sense and decency.
