After the Giants’ loss to the Tampa Bay Rays on Aug. 16, Gabe Kapler had to explain his pinch-hitting philosophy for what probably felt like the 100th time. For two games in a row, he either did — or did not — pinch hit for a rookie just recently called up in a big spot in the game. Neither string he pulled worked, during a stretch in which San Francisco had lost seven of nine.
Kapler, frustrated with his team’s performance, took umbrage with the line of questioning postgame.
The moment wasn’t notable for Kapler’s agitated tone, or for the corresponding discourse from an angsty fan base clamoring for anything to pounce on — par for the course in the Kapler era.
What really stuck out about the rather nothingburger interaction was the subject at hand. Kapler was making decisions on who out of Heliot Ramos, Wade Meckler and Austin Slater gave the Giants even the slightest edge to win games.
He was picking between a rookie in his third game who got called up at least a year too early, a 23-year-old with a career .213 MLB batting average, and a veteran hitting .121 for a month and a half.
Squeezing every ounce of potential with aggressive in-game management is limited to the actual talent available. The players Farhan Zaidi bestowed on Kapler this season didn’t get it done, and for that, Kapler is out of a job with a year left on his deal.
The club’s disappointing 2023 season wasn’t Kapler’s fault — even if he took responsibility for not getting the absolute best out of his players. But after two straight years of .500 ball, dismissing him was perhaps the only lever the organization had to pull to for substantial change.
“I don’t think we did good enough for him,” ace Logan Webb said Friday. “I think there needs to be a standard set of how we are going to play baseball here. It’s one of the first things I learned when I first came up. I got to be in a clubhouse with Bum, Buster, Craw, Belt — there’s a standard to playing San Francisco Giants baseball. I think we haven’t done a good job of that.”
“It’s a shitty day for Giants baseball in general, just because as a whole, we haven’t done our jobs,” Webb added.
Zaidi fired a manager he didn’t have a single negative word to say about. He called Kapler hard-working, diligent, thoughtful, loyal and passionate. Despite the tea leaves from Zaidi’s radio hit a day before, players were shocked when they heard the news.
Kapler was the same exact guy as he was in 2021, when he won National League Manager of the Year while guiding the Giants to a franchise-record 107 wins. Nobody was complaining about his pinch-hitting strategy when the club set the all-time record for pinch homers.
But the team needs a new voice, Zaidi concluded. As it goes in Major League Baseball, the manager is the most fungible position to shake-up.
“I think we’re looking for a new and different leadership in our clubhouse,” Zaidi said. “Different dynamic there. I think there’s a lot of responsibility to go around, and a lot of sense of accountability for what happened today — starting with me. I know 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. Frankly, it just hasn’t happened the last couple years.”
Kapler’s leadership style lended itself to allowing players to police themselves. He preferred 1-on-1 conversations to addressing the team. Most players consider Kapler a clear, effective communicator. He was one that often had to implement strategies that were challenging for players to adapt; he got buy-in when the club was winning, but less when the wheels fell off.
Allow Mike Yastrzemski to explain how Kapler’s hands-off style went in a clubhouse without Brandon Belt or Buster Posey.
“I think there was just a little kind of fend for yourself type of atmosphere that somehow fell into place,” Yastrzemski said. “I don’t know where it came from, but it kind of just 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. I think that’s one of the biggest things when you look at successful brands and successful teams, is that they have unity and a common goal. I think we have to refocus on that and regenerate a very narrow window of where all of our eyesight should be.”
Perhaps the leadership hierarchy broke down, but parsing a clubhouse with fissures versus one that’s simply losing games is difficult. If the Giants had gone .500 in September and claimed a wild card spot, reports of a clubhouse in anarchy — which those within the team view as overblown — wouldn’t have surfaced. Anonymous quotes on losing the clubhouse, stories of Bob Marley and Pusoy wouldn’t have created so much noise.
“I just think we started losing ball games,” Alex Cobb told KNBR.com. “I don’t think anything changed in this locker room from when we were winning ball games to losing ball games. I think we just started losing ball games and that makes you start to look around. If we were continuing to win ball games, fingers and ideas of what went wrong in the clubhouse wouldn’t be talked about.”
The Giants don’t have a bad clubhouse, veterans assure. The culture is similar to what it was in 2021 — lax until the team needs to lock in for games and diligent with pregame preparation on an individual basis.
Maybe when things got too loose, Kapler could’ve stepped in. But if players can’t get up for the biggest games of the season — which isn’t necessarily even the case — that’s on them. Allowing players to police themselves works when the clubhouse has professionals. Giving adults that freedom is empowering; no locker room wants a babysitter as their manager.
Logan Webb’s “big changes” comments reverberated still — even if the star clarified Friday he wasn’t referring to Kapler. Still, front office leaders theorized the clubhouse “vibe” could have contributed to the collapse.
“At the end of the day, it’s the performance on the field,” Austin Slater, who played for Kapler in each of the manager’s four seasons in SF, said. “That’s to blame.”
Zaidi made his decision as the Giants went 2-8 on the road with their postseason hopes in the balance. With everything on the line, they played their worst baseball, losing three of four in Coors Field and a pair against the Diamondbacks.
A throughline with this organization — Kapler, Zaidi and the rest of the brain trust — has been sample sizes. The team always wants as much data as possible to make informed decisions.
But Kapler’s firing, ironically, came down to that two-week stretch and ongoing spiral.
“Playing the way we did when we controlled our own destiny, that was hard to watch for everybody,” Zaidi said. “Hard for the players to go through, hard for our fans to watch, hard for us as an organization to watch. I think that really accelerated our view that we need to make difficult decisions and think about things differently.”
Had Kapler flipped a spread or called a team meeting during that stretch, would the club’s performance have been any different? The same roster — the one that has broken the franchise record for striking out, paces the league in errors, ranks last in stolen bases and doesn’t have a single everyday player who strikes real fear in opposing pitchers — still would’ve been on the field.
It’s not Kapler’s fault that San Francisco’s free agent signings either underperformed or were unavailable. That nobody besides Wilmer Flores stepped up to produce consistent power. That Joey Bart hasn’t panned out or the Giants drafted Hunter Bishop over Corbin Carroll. Kapler wasn’t in the outfield forgetting how many outs there were or in the batter’s box hitting 15 home runs as a $20 million designated hitter.
In fact, Kapler worked in lockstep with Zaidi. The strategies that rubbed some the wrong way — platooning and openers — were devised by Kapler and the front office in tandem, and necessary because of Zaidi’s flawed roster.
All the failures have inspired soul searching from everyone, but Kapler won’t get to do so as the Giants’ manager.
Zaidi hopes to find San Francisco’s next skipper by the time free agency opens in the second week of November. As part of his “rethink everything” pledge, Zaidi seems open to hiring a manager with a different perspective than the analytically aligned Kapler.
“When I talk about needing to do things differently, having greater separation between the manager and coaching staff and the front office might be something we need to look at,” Zaidi said. “I know that for anybody coming into this situation, any managerial candidate is going to want to understand the degree of autonomy that they’re going to have, to put their imprint on this team. And I think whoever we hire, we’re going to want them to put their own imprint on this team.
Kapler’s imprint now has faded. His dismissal probably had to be done. But as much as baseball is a results-based game, when it comes to managers, it’s not always a meritocracy.