Gabe Kapler is the new manager of the San Francisco Giants. The Giants had approximately 7.7 billion people to choose from in their search to replace a certain Hall of Famer, but they honed in on their eventual choice early, and they never let him go. Farhan Zaidi knew Kapler from their days in Los Angeles, and Andrew Baggarly did a superb job reading between the lines at the year-end press conference. The organization probably had more than a suspicion that they were going to choose Kapler to replace Bruce Bochy back then.
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You might disagree with the choice, but at least you have to admire the conviction behind it. The Giants could have chosen almost anyone, from Hensley Meulens to Mike Scioscia to, I don’t know, Casey McGehee, who would have taken the brunt of whatever managerial criticism came up. The front office would have taken the criticism for choosing the players and the manager would have taken the criticism for motivating and deploying them. This is the natural order of things.
Instead, the Giants chose the one guy who can’t be separated from the front office. There is no Kapler without Zaidi, no scenario in which he becomes the manager with anyone else in charge, so the manager’s successes or failures will become the president of baseball operations’ successes or failures.
Which means Zaidi has to be pretty damned sure about this. Pretty, pretty, pretty damned sure about this. That’s a pool of 7.7 billion people to choose from, and approximately one who could blow up on him like an ink pack in a bank robbery.
Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty damned sure.
The rest of the Giants-focused world? Not as sure! Social media isn’t the real world, so be careful about extrapolating too much from it, but this isn’t a popular pick among Giants fans on social media. Whether it’s the replies under Baggarly’s tweets or the comments under a Facebook post, it’s an absolute landslide of disappointed responses. Occasionally a few weeds of “Well, let’s just see how this works out” will poke through the cracks, but there are a lot of minds that need to be changed.
Part of this has to do with how fans evaluate managerial candidates: They extrapolate a lot. There usually isn’t a lot of information available to the public, so it’s easy to latch on to something, anything to form your opinion. Hensley Meulens was beloved by the players, unless he was the guy who couldn’t teach the 2017 Giants how to hit. Houston bench coach Joe Espada has that championship-winning sheen from a next-frontier organization, unless he’s possibly a trash-can-banging apologist from the organization that has serious institutional problems. It’s totally normal to take a kernel of information and run with it. It’s usually all you have.
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The information Giants fans have about Kapler, though? Well, it’s not great. The wrong place to start is with his performance in Philadelphia, but it’s an even worse place to end, so here we go: After two seasons managing the Phillies, there was a distinct lack of shock, confusion and anger when he was fired after last season. The writers knew it was coming. The fans knew it was coming. And there weren’t a lot of furrowed brows and impassioned pleas on his behalf. There were 389 comments under the initial story on The Good Phight, a Phillies blog, and most of them fell into two categories:
• Don’t let the door hit your tanned butt on the way out.
• He kind of got a raw deal, but whatever.
Unless I skipped one, that’s it. That’s the spectrum. There weren’t a lot of “YOU’RE MAKING A HUGE MISTAKE” reactions from fans and only a couple from Philadelphia pundits. You would think there would be more. But, whatever, that’s a minor quibble. Terry Francona didn’t inspire those reactions when the Phillies fired him, either, and 20 years (and two World Series titles) later, he’s still managing. Two seasons of ho-hum baseball shouldn’t color a potential manager for life.
Far more troubling is a 2015 incident during Kapler’s tenure as the director of player development for the Dodgers.This was the Washington Post headline:
Told of girl’s assault at spring training hotel, Gabe Kapler, Dodgers didn’t alert police.
While it’s true that Kapler and his wife established a foundation to help abused women back in 2004 (though I’m not sure if it’s still active), and that domestic violence is an issue close to his heart … that headline sure sums up a horrible turn of events. If anything, the charity work makes it even more appalling that Kapler thought a dinner between the victim and her alleged assailants was the right response. You can read his response here, in which he claims the wishes of the victim’s grandmother was the reason he didn’t go to the police, but there’s no parsing that headline in a favorable way. Told of a 17-year-old girl’s assault, Gabe Kapler didn’t alert police.
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This is the information we have, and it’s a whole lot more to run with than any of the other candidates. To replace Bochy with a manager who comes through the front door holding a lot of baggage, the offseason after the team’s CEO was suspended over a public altercation with his wife, the Giants had to be pretty damned sure that Kapler was so far above the other candidates, so wildly overqualified, that it was worth convincing a wildly skeptical fan base.
Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty damned sure.
The toothpaste is out of the tube, though, and it was spread all over the mirror, so we’ll have to wait and see if anyone will call it art. There’s no going back for the front office, as the Giants chose the one guy they would have to wear more than anyone else. Dusty Baker, Joe Maddon, Scott Freaking Cousins … ifany of them failed as the new manager of the Giants, the ire would be directed toward the manager.
The Giants front office picked the guy who would allow that ire to be shared with it.
Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty damned sure.
The Giants needed a manager who could communicate with his players. They needed someone who could sift through the torrents of information available to him and help his team succeed. They needed someone who had the mutual respect of the front office, and they needed someone to be the face of an organization that was losing one of the most popular managers in baseball history. They decided on Kapler.
You might disagree with the choice, but the Giants? They’re pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty damned sure. If you’re going to be optimistic about the move, that conviction is the best place to start.
Considering the information at hand, it might be the only place to start.
(Photo: Eric Hartline / USA TODAY Sports)
Grant Brisbee is a staff writer for The Athletic, covering the San Francisco Giants. Grant has written about the Giants since 2003 and covered Major League Baseball for SB Nation from 2011 to 2019. He is a two-time recipient of the SABR Analytics Research Award. Follow Grant on Twitter @GrantBrisbee
