In dismissing Giants manager Gabe Kapler, Farhan Zaidi acknowledges its time to listen and adapt (2024)

Publish date: 2024-04-27

SAN FRANCISCO — Gabe Kapler wasn’t fired because he lost the clubhouse. He wasn’t fired because his players detested him.

He wasn’t fired because he was insubordinate or started showing up late or began mailing it in. He wasn’t fired because he was too intense or because he wasn’t intense enough. He wasn’t fired for any of the insipid, superficial criticisms leveled at him by the dregs of social media: his shirts were too tight, his ChatGPT sound bites were too abstruse, he had the audacity to eat an apple in the middle of a game.

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And no, he wasn’t fired because of a systematic and seemingly scripted approach to game management — one that gave little credence to the hot hand or gut feel or giving fans the matchup that they wanted to see. That approach was part and parcel of the front office he worked under.

Kapler didn’t build the machine. It was merely his job to keep it lubricated.

So why was Kapler fired on Friday afternoon, with three games and one more season remaining on his contract? Why did he become the first San Francisco Giants manager in 38 years to be relieved of his duties, ending a run of remarkable franchise stability when it came to the industry’s most volatile occupation?

Because the Giants didn’t win enough. Why didn’t the Giants win enough? Because their roster didn’t have nearly enough talent or continuity. Why didn’t their roster have enough talent or continuity? Maybe because Giants president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi operated with blind spots that have been so large at times that you wondered who ripped off the side mirrors.

Zaidi has had five years to guide the Giants into the National League’s upper echelon. He’s worked with the broadest of latitudes. He made dozens of shrewd moves but received no pushback on the strange or unpopular decisions. That much was clear from his very first opening day in 2019, when the Giants started two unknowns (Connor Joe and Michael Reed) in the outfield corners. Zaidi’s five seasons have included one playoff appearance and many, many forced fits.

And now, with the Giants unable to clear the low bar of becoming the third NL wild-card team, with attendance flat while the rest of the league is up 10 percent, and with even their wait-and-see fans running short on patience, club ownership has delivered a mandate to their chief baseball executive.

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No more forced fits.

The #SFGiants announced that the club has dismissed manager Gabe Kapler.

— SFGiants (@SFGiants) September 29, 2023

Kapler happened to be one of those forced fits. He was a hard sell from the moment Zaidi hired him to replace Bruce Bochy after the 2019 season. Kapler was a manager who would work exhaustively (and sometimes exhaustingly) to get the most out of players while pulling the game-level levers he was supposed to pull.

It was always pull. Never push.

Even when the Giants won a franchise-record 107 games in 2021, there was a sense that the franchise was moving away from the cozy and conventional brand of baseball that fans had become accustomed to watching. Every major-league team to some extent has gravitated toward empiricism and away from romanticism. But for the Giants, the connection with fans has become acutely frayed — especially after Buster Posey announced his retirement after the 2021 season, leaving a roster of players with little prominence and even less permanence. Perhaps Kapler wasn’t to blame for that disconnect with the paying customers. But he didn’t help matters. He has many fine and admirable attributes. Easy charisma is not among them.

Giants chairman Greg Johnson and the rest of the club’s executive board, which now includes Posey, is betting that Zaidi is bright enough to adapt and operate with different marching orders, beginning with the task of identifying Kapler’s replacement — someone who might be more willing to push back and be a moderating influence on Zaidi’s baseball operations group instead of an amplifying one.

“Being open and flexible to different ideas, different perspectives, is something I’m going to have to take going forward,” said Zaidi, meeting with reporters in the Giants dugout shortly after the club announced Kapler’s firing in a news release.

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Those might have been the most important words uttered at Third and King on Friday afternoon. Things will be different going forward, whether that means more lineup continuity or longer-term contracts or letting a player hit for himself after he homered in his previous at-bat.

Then there were the most important words that the news release contained: that Zaidi made the recommendation to relieve Kapler of duties and that ownership accepted his recommendation. Whether that’s the whole truth or a bartered one, it’s the way the Giants had to play this.

The other time Kapler was fired with a year remaining on his contract, dismissed after two seasons in Philadelphia following the 2019 season, it was made clear that Phillies owner John Middleton made the decision over the objections of general manager Matt Klentak — a move that effectively kneecapped the franchise’s chief baseball executive and marked him as not long for the job. The Giants’ top decision makers did not want Zaidi, whom they continue to respect, to come off as a weak executive. This was a way for Greg Johnson to save face, too, after the Giants’ chairman and control person told the San Francisco Chronicle as recently as two weeks ago that Kapler and Zaidi would be back in 2024.

It was a popular assumption that Zaidi and Kapler were a package deal. But an 8-16 record in September under Kapler, a 6-28 road record since late July, and a brusque exit from the wild-card race when their playoff odds were better than 75 percent as recently as Aug. 3 was all it took to untether the two men. There was strong foreshadowing Thursday afternoon when Zaidi declined to give assurances to Kapler during his call-in appearance on KNBR while remarking that the Giants played their “worst baseball when it mattered most” and “we’re really going to have to ask ourselves if we were prepared to elevate our level of focus and play for those games that really mattered down the stretch.”

“We want our players to be comfortable and be able to wash off some of the tough losses and things like that,” Zaidi said on KNBR. “But when you’re in do-or-die games like those games in Arizona, you want them to feel different.”

So the Giants didn’t wait until the bitter end of a disappointing season to begin making major changes. Even if nobody could feel good about them in the moment.

A humbled Zaidi faced a cocoon of cameras and reporters in the home dugout in the hours before the Giants, under interim manager Kai Correa, lost 6-2 to the Los Angeles Dodgers to fall to 78-82, guaranteeing themselves a losing record in 2023.

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“I don’t have one negative thing to say about Gabe Kapler,” Zaidi said. “Not just as a person, but from a professional standpoint and during his time with us. He’s thoughtful, he’s creative, he’s incredibly hard working. He’s loyal. He’s diligent. He’s really passionate about this game. He was passionate about the job that he had and did. And we obviously, we reached some really high highs during his tenure here. And that’s what makes it so difficult for us to be here and have to turn the page on his tenure.”

It’s easy to forget that the Giants’ first season under Kapler was played in the midst of a pandemic and global lockdown. It was a time that required organization and leadership. Kapler provided it. The Giants were one of few teams that avoided a single positive test for COVID-19. There was never a question about Kapler’s diligence and commitment to put in the work. Both before and after Friday’s announcement, several players remarked that they felt Kapler truly cared about them and wanted them to be the best version of themselves on and off the field.

But it was obvious to even casual observers that the Giants had lost their edge in the second half this season.

“I’ve said this a couple of times publicly and just to reiterate it, the thing that has been on my mind and on the minds of other people in this organization is as a group, as a team, we played our worst baseball when it mattered the most,” Zaidi said. “I know you guys (in the media) have been working on figuring out why that happened. And there’s a lot of questions for fans on why that happened. We have a lot of work to figure out why that happened.

“But we felt like step one was making this change. We’re looking for new and different leadership in our clubhouse, a different dynamic there. There’s a lot of responsibility to go around and a lot of sense of accountability for what’s happened today, starting with me. I know that it’s ultimately my job to put a product on the field that our organization is proud of, and that our fans are proud of, and, frankly, just hasn’t happened the last couple of years. That’s been difficult for me. It’s been difficult for a lot of people. I also feel very determined to fix it. I think collectively, we can fix it. We’re not satisfied with how things have gone the past couple of years.

“I know I have to think about things differently. I know we as an organization have to do things differently and a lot of those things are difficult, starting with the move today.”

If Kapler had his own blind spot, it was a belief that it would be enough to provide players with every resource they needed for the organization to get the most out of them. It was an unwillingness to adapt his hands-off management style in which he relied on the clubhouse to police itself. That might have worked as long as Posey had a locker along the back wall. It might have worked if Carlos Correa’s $350 million contract hadn’t fallen through based on a failed physical this past winter. But in a clubhouse of players on short-term contracts, many of them asked to accept gerrymandered roles, more oversight was needed. Especially when the season became as unstable as a melting three-scoop ice cream cone.

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It wasn’t enough that the Giants employed a full-time coach to help players with breathing exercises and to walk barefoot with them in the outfield grass. It wasn’t enough that the Giants employed another full-time coach whose chief responsibility was to splice together humorous hype videos to make mandatory hitter’s meetings a bit more engaging. Kapler explored every angle to make the players feel as supported as possible. Perhaps it all became too much.

The Giants clubhouse was a copacetic place. But there can be a dangerous line between copacetic and comatose. Especially when the losses begin to pile up.

The players forgot how to push back, too.

“I think a kind of ‘fend for yourself’ type of atmosphere somehow fell into place,” outfielder Mike Yastrzemski said. “I don’t know where it came from, but it kind of took over where everybody felt like they could do their own thing and it made it feel like there wasn’t an entire group effort or a sense of unity. When you look at successful brands and successful teams, they have unity in a common goal. And I think that we need to refocus on that and to generate a very narrow window of where all of our eyesight should be.”

Public comments in September from players like Yastrzemski and Logan Webb, who called for “big changes” after making his final regular-season start in a Cy Young-caliber season, pointed to a level of dysfunction that went beyond the usual byproduct of a team sliding out of contention. When reporters surrounded Webb at his locker Friday afternoon, the 26-year-old right-hander said he wasn’t advocating for specific changes. He wasn’t gleeful in the slightest over Kapler’s dismissal. But the changes that Webb described were so fundamental that it’s hard to imagine them happening without a change of leadership.

“As a kid growing up in Sacramento, watching from afar, there just seemed to be a certain way that baseball was done here,” Webb said. “You walk in the clubhouse and you were across the way from a Buster Posey. So it’s like, ‘I’m gonna do everything I can to try to be like that guy.’ … Respect your peers, respect your elders, respect the game of baseball, and then play as hard as you can and compete every single day. I’m not saying we haven’t done that. I’m just saying if we can emphasize that a little bit more, maybe we have six or seven more wins and something like today doesn’t happen.”

What happened on Friday was something that the Giants hadn’t done since 1985, when they relieved manager Jim Davenport of his duties and replaced him with pitching coach Roger Craig with 18 games remaining in the season. From Craig to Dusty Baker to Felipe Alou to Bochy, the Giants enjoyed remarkable continuity in the dugout while other franchises chewed through managers like a pack of Doublemint.

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But the Giants are not so remarkable as to be immune from this game’s rhythms and responsibilities. Every franchise must issue corrections when a season disappoints. Every manager who gets fired is a scapegoat to some extent.

“Everybody can have their opinions but Kap was a great guy and he truly did care about everybody in this clubhouse,” Yastrzemski said. “That’s something that you can’t take away from him or from any of us. It’s unfortunate that this is the nature of the beast that he wears the burden of our performance. He had a lot of fingers pointed at him when it may not necessarily have been his fault. But he was willing to wear that for us.”

Kapler took the fall. Zaidi seemingly has another chance.

Perhaps the next manager won’t be such a forced fit.

(Top photo of Gabe Kapler: Andy Kuno / San Francisco Giants / Getty Images)

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