It’s not quite right to say I was against the Giants hiring Gabe Kapler from the moment they made the announcement, but only because I was against the Giants hiring Gabe Kapler a month before they made the announcement. Here’s how I opened my article on Kapler just getting interviewed:
How’s your Saturday going? Good? I hope so. Anyway, Jon Heyman is trying to ruin it, and I’m going to help him with that:
Sources: #SFGiants will interview Gabe Kapler. SF baseball prez Farhan Zaidi loves him when they were together with #DodgersYes, the Giants are going to talk with Gabe Kapler about their managerial opening.
So when they finally hired him a month later, well, my opinion had stayed pretty consistent. Nope, bad idea. The Phillies should have been good, and they weren’t. Didn’t like how he handled the 2015 Dodgers incident. If he got hired, it would be a sign that Farhan was just getting his guy and it hadn’t ever been a real competition at all. Don’t do it, Giants.
Anyway, the Giants did it, and if I’m being honest, so far it’s been…pretty not that bad?
Now, on the field, it hasn’t been pretty not that bad at all, and Kapler’s done some things that irritated fans or players or both. Johnny Cueto didn’t like the quick hook he faced in the season opener, for one example. Kapler’s bullpen use has led to a lot of runs scored against the Giants, including in that season opener, and he made a mental mistake against the Padres when he made a second visit to Tyler Rogers on the mound during the same at-bat.
And the defense has been atrocious. The Giants lead the universe in errors, and some of that comes back to deliberate managerial decisions. The coaching staff moved Tyler Heineman closer to the plate when he was catching, and that’s led to three catcher’s interference calls. Against the Rockies, Alex Dickerson has been in right field with two far superior defenders, Steven Duggar and Mike Yastrzemski, in left and center, respectively, and Dickerson’s error and later misplay on Monday might have cost them the game.
But on the other hand, the Giants are bad.
You might not think that explains any of Kapler’s faults here, but it actually does explain them very neatly. The Giants have been a significantly less talented team than every opponent they’ve faced so far this year, maybe excluding the Rangers. It is therefore the optimal strategy for the Giants to embrace high-risk, high-reward decisions backed up by data. Yes, the standard place to put Alex Dickerson would be left field, but if the Giants play do things the standard way, they will lose. They are worse than the Rockies. So they look for an edge, any edge, that might even the playing field a bit.
Same thing with moving Heineman up. Yes, it backfired, but if you don’t try things, then you are conceding losses. Why not push things to see if you can find an edge? What do you have to lose? Baseball games? Because oh boy, do I have news for you about how you were already going to do in those baseball games.
As for the pitchers, you would expect Cueto to be mad he was taken out early, but the Giants were doing the smart thing and treating it like a mid-late Spring Training start, with a strict pitch limit. The Giants pitching staff has done a good job so far avoiding injuries, especially compared to the rest of the league, where guys are dropping like the other shoe. They’ve had to slow-play their starters to keep their arms as healthy as possible, and when a bullpen has to pick up 5 innings a night, well, unfrotunately someone’s gonna shit the bed.
The visiting Rogers thing twice was just pure dumb, though. No excuses there.
And while I think those errors are mostly all excusable — and the Giants, for the record, have been hitting a lot better than anyone expected coming into the year. I don’t know how much credit the coaches get for that but I’m pretty sure the answer’s not zero — they’re not what’s impressed me about Kapler.
No, I’ve been impressed by the way he’s thrown himself into social causes. Kapler has been full-throated in his support of Black Lives Matter, kneeling during the anthem and making his positions known on police brutality and racial inequalities. There is an earnestness and a curiosity to him that I didn’t appreciate before, an absolute dedication to getting as much information as possible on a subject and then acting immediately based on that information.
That’s the same thing he’s doing on the field too: getting informed about little edges from the front office, then going out and putting them into practice in that day’s game. Sometimes it won’t work, as we’ve seen. Sometimes it will, like when Trevor Gott became closer and has been perfectly fine in that role and barely gets talked about.
There is no real way to know how Kapler’s doing in the clubhouse — the reporters who would ordinarily be able to tell us the mood are not allowed in, and so they and we are left with scraps from interviews they try to piece together. But from what we heard about the protests before the first exhibition game against the A’s, Kapler did a good job communicating why he was kneeling and taking some of the pressure off if the players wanted to join him. I can’t say if he is overall a good leader or not, but I can say that one act was good leadership.
When you put all that together, I think it comes out to someone who is doing reasonably well. Yes, he could be better, but he could also be a lot worse, and he is at least trying new things that have a shot of jump starting a team whose battery died in 2016. Sure, wins would be nice, but so would a roster with good major league pitchers. Kapler’s doing okay, I think, so Slightly Younger Doug can calm down.