If you listen to the McCovey Chroncast — rate us 5 stars on iTunes, you wretched ingrates! — then this week, you heard us discuss all the current issues of the day, from Pete Putila’s hiring to the Giants’ offseason plans. You’ll never guess this unless you listened to the podcast or read the title of this post, but one of those topics was Bruce Bochy getting hired to manage the Texas Rangers.
Yes, Boch is officially a Ranger now, with Texas giving him a 3-year deal to manage a team that hasn’t been over .500 since 2016. Once the news came out about Bochy’s interview, it seemed like a fait accompli that he would manage somewhere, because Bochy has a great reputation around the game and he was clearly interested in being back in a dugout, so someone was going to be interested back.
Bruce Bochy, then, is a Texas Ranger.
A certain segment of Giants fandom is not happy.
The Giants let Bruce Bochy get away in favor of Gabe Kapler! How could they? Bochy won three World Series! Kapler can’t resist the siren call of .500! Bochy offered Brandon Belt a beer that time! Kapler wouldn’t allow himself to have a normal birthday cake, and also wouldn’t eat the substitute! Bruce Bochy is a Baseball Man through and through, and Gabe Kapler is just some kale-eatin’ weirdo.
And look, I like Bochy as much as any Giants fan who remembers Denny Bautista, but let’s be honest: when he went, it was time for him to go.
Under Bruce Bochy’s managership, the Giants were absolutely fucking godawful in 2017. Just a repulsive, hideous mess of a baseball team that didn’t do a single thing well. The next year, they were better but still quite bad. The year after that, they were a few games better, but still bad. This was all with Bruce Bochy, and Buster Posey, and younger versions of the Brandons, and Madison Bumgarner.
The team was bad, and nothing Bochy did overcame it. In all likelihood, there wasn’t a lot he could do, and so the 2017 team spent the whole year floundering, and the 2018 team went 5-21 in September, and the 2019 team found a few contributors but was generally more of the same. There was no burst of energy from the manager’s office, no signs of life that made Bochy noises. There was just malaise, and more of the same, forever.
So the Giants and Bochy announced a parting of ways, as of the end of the year, and the team had their nice farewells, and then they hired Gabe Kapler. And while some of us are still a little skeeved out by some of his decision making as Dodgers farm director, what’s done is done and hopefully he learned from that and moved on. What we’re judging him on here is his time as Giants manager.
And honestly, he’s been good. Yes, anyone who wins 107 games in one season will look good, but on the other hand, Kapler’s decisions were part of that season and he helped them win. Yes, the 2022 Giants were a social experiment to see how much mediocrity one fanbase could survive, but they were also a not particularly talented offense or bullpen. The team spent most of the year in a state of free fall, and still somehow ended up right at .500. That’s not a good year by any means, but it’s still better than you’d expect, considering everyone who played terribly, and credit for that goes to Kapler.
All those constant annoying platoons? That was Kapler maximizing every advantage in ways that Bochy never would have. The way the Giants strategically rested their older players to keep them as fresh as possible? Bochy would have Castilla’d those guys into the ground instead. The way Kapler practically immediately trusted Camilo Doval in the 9th? It would have taken Bochy months of Jake McGee’s failures to get to that point.
That’s not to say that Bruce Bochy is a bad manager or anything like that, but a Bochy-led 2022 Giants team would have been worse than the team we got. From what we saw from Bochy over more than a decade, he’s not built for those kinds of moves. He does plenty of other things very well, and I don’t want to minimize that, but I don’t think Gabe Kapler was the problem with the Giants this year, and if he was, then I certainly don’t think Bruce Bochy was the solution.
Bochy is off to Texas, then, and Kapler is staying right here. There are those who will complain about this, and since I’m a good solid American who will invoke the First Amendment in any situation, no matter how not-technically-relevant it is, I support their right to speak their truth. But also, they’re wrong. Bruce Bochy was the right manager for the Giants for a long time. He’d be the wrong manager for them today.
Hahaha. Man, these "round up the angry tweets" posts always leave me giggling with coffee all over the damn place. Well done.
Also: KAPLER WAS UNDER CONTRACT WITH PHILADELPHIA THROUGH 2020 WHEN BOCHY RETIRED YOU TWITTER IDIOTS.
The idea that Farhan "fired" Bochy in Spring of 2019 in order to get Kapler would suggest the Giants are very lucky to have Farhan because he can see the future and somehow knew that Kapler would be fired (with another season left on the contract and nearly $1M due to him) EIGHT MONTHS in the future.
Also 2: Everyone assuming that Brandon Belt will obviously assume 1B/DH duties with the Rangers simply because Bochy is the manager?! Did they not live through the first dozen battles of the Belt Wars? I am but a withered old man but much of the fanbase was incensed with the manner that Bochy deployed Belt early in his career. Yes, Belt is a grizzled veteran now - Yes, they won a couple of World Series together - But, also, did anyone notice how Belt had his best two seasons (by OPS+) in Kapler's first two years as manager and he credited the new coaching staff with supporting him completely? NO? No one remembers that? Ok. Anyhow, Belt might have a comfort level with Bochy more than other managers who are unknown to him. And, sure, playing closer to his offseason home might appeal to the big guy. But assuming the Belt/Rangers is fait accompli seems like a wild narrative stretch to me. If the dollars and the vibes match up, Brandon Belt could be a Ranger. But the same could be said for what...12 other teams?