Who is Gabe Kapler, really? The new Giants manager just wants everybody to get to know him (2024)

We are in Gabe Kapler’s office, which is a weird thing to say. This is Bruce Bochy’s office, right? Or at least it was for 13 years. This tucked-away den at Oracle Park is where Bochy hung photos of World Series parades and stashed bottles of pricey pinot noir in the wine cabinet behind him. This is where Bochy held court with his folksy growl, where he wrote names like Pence and Lincecum into his lineup card, where he dropped one-liners so stealthily that they often went undetected.

Aside from the energetic new Giants manager, sitting here behind the desk, the office is mostly barren. Even Bullwinkle is gone. The mounted elk head that watched solemnly over the proceedings of the Bochy era has been shipped off to an even less natural habitat: He resides these days at the Mauna Loa Club, a dive bar in the Marina, hammered up on the wall between a “Golden Tee” and a “Pop-A-Shot.” (Bullwinkle, that is, not Bochy.)

Now, here is Kapler on this late November day, talking quickly and with corporate polish from behind the stately mahogany desk he inherited from his predecessor. Behind him, the white-bricked walls are as clean and as bare as a fresh start.

What are Kapler’s plans for the place?

“So, so glad you asked that question,’’ Kapler replied. “You and I are going to feel much different once (it’s decorated). Environment-building is really important. And I think that design touches make all the difference in conversations like this one. This office needs some life and some plants and some art. I don’t want this to feel like a jail cell.”

Kapler said he was awaiting a shipment of black-and-white photos he’s collected over the years. The images are carefully curated, as are most things with Kapler. There are no frivolities with him, no wasted energy. The photos — like his diet, like what he reads, like the stats he embraces, like the words he chooses, like his umpire-mandated ejections — are selected with a specific purpose in mind.

The pictures, upon arrival, will have an immediate job to do. They will send a message to visitors about what Gabe Kapler believes in.

“So, there are some political figures there. There are some sports figures there,’’ he said. “Muhammad Ali is one, Jackie Robinson is one of them.

“Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Nelson Mandela. They will all have space somewhere in this office. And I’ll find my way to probably choosing a few more.”

Kapler, 44, is from the San Fernando Valley and grew up in the neighborhood of Reseda. He points out that his hometown is famous for two things: It’s mentioned in the Tom Petty song “Free Fallin’” and it’s where Ralph Macchio’s character lives in the “The Karate Kid.”

Kapler will happily wax on about his about childhood because, at heart, it still defines him. “Everything I am today,’’ he said, “is a result of that upbringing.” His bedroom walls had photos, too. Kapler’s personal décor in those days included images of Ty Cobb, Pete Rose and Charles Barkley.

It’s easy to spot the theme there. That sporting trio looks pulled straight from a BuzzFeed quiz about the most combustible athletes of all time. In fact, the best word to describe Cobb, Rose and Barkley might be … let’s see here … polarizing.

Kapler laughs, sort of.

“Of course we’re going there. Awesome,’’ he said, throwing his hands up in mock disgust. “Another headline that says: ‘Kapler polarizing.’”

Indeed, there have been a steady stream of those since Nov. 12, when the Giants announced him as their choice to right the ship after three consecutive losing seasons in which the team finished a combined 87.5 games behind the Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League West.

Kapler’s hiring was immediately and overwhelming unpopular, with the welcoming tweet from the Giants’ official Twitter account turning into a tire fire of semi-hostile responses.

There were questions about how Kapler and Farhan Zaidi, the Giants president of baseball operations, handled alleged assaults on women by minor-league players in 2015, while both were executives in the Dodgers organization.

To a lesser extent, there was backlash of Kapler’s disappointing managerial stint with the Phillies. He went 80-82 and 81-81 over the past two seasons in Philadelphia, amid much scrutiny over his bullpen usage. A Deadspin headline once asked, “What Did Gabe Kapler f*ck Up This Time?” That was one week into his managerial career.

Beyond the checkered resume, Kapler also comes equipped with a persona that would fit on a poster next to Barkley, Cobb and Rose. One source, who worked with Kapler at a previous stop, declined to comment when reached for this story. “On the record or off?” the source asked. “Because if it’s on the record, I’d have to lie.”

Another former Kapler co-worker also had his reservations: “Kapler is a high-energy guy. And he means well. I think he means well. But he’s not for everybody. The personality isn’t for everybody. He is kind of a my-way-or-the-highway type of guy.”

Then again, polarizing, by definition, means that people feel just as strongly on the other side. Supporters say that Kapler’s confidence and relentless intellectual curiosity are contagious. They say his outsized personality, his successful history in player development and his evolving skills as a strategist make him an ideal fit for a team in transition.

“I certainly know people who know him, and they speak very highly of him,’’ said Ron Wotus, the longtime Giants coach who will remain on Kapler’s staff. “Obviously, he’s well-spoken. He’s very passionate. And he’s been in high regard from the Dodger days to getting the job here.

“Those are the things I notice right up front: It’s his energy, his ability to communicate, it’s his positive attitude.”

During the Giants’ interview process, both Bochy and Buster Posey met with Kapler as the team whittled down its finalist list. Both of those mainstays — no-nonsense types with finely honed B.S. detectors — strongly recommended Kapler, according to team sources, which helped solidify the official decision.

So, yes, Kapler generates opposing viewpoints, much like his poster subjects. He is aware of the controversy surrounding him and is eager for people to understand the fuller picture.

“I’m drawn to colorful people,” he said during this interview in his office. “I’m interested in people who are different than me. I loved biographies as a kid. I wasn’t interested in novels. I wasn’t nearly as interested in reading stories. But I loved biographies. I loved digging into people’s psychology — what makes them tick and how they’re motivated.

“And, so, I think the more colorful a person, the more you learn about them right away. I read Barkley’s biography. I read books on Pete Rose. I read books on Ty Cobb as well, to dig into what made them tick and where they came from.”

And from his own biography?

Well, pull up a chair in this sparse, open room of possibilities. Getting to know Gabe Kapler’s origin story is no ordinary day at the office.

Bochy spent a lot of extra time in this room, albeit against his will. His 77 career ejections rank ninth in baseball history, putting him in a top-10 list also strewn with the volcanic ash of Bobby Cox (158 ejections), John McGraw (118) and Earl Weaver (94).

In contrast, Kapler would prefer to never, ever get thrown out of a game. It’s not rational. The math doesn’t add up. Clinical studies would show that umpires don’t suddenly change a ball to a strike, so that all that kicking and screaming represents little more than wasted energy. “We have replay now, so we can challenge it,’’ Kapler said. “It makes even less sense to throw your hands up at that point.”

Kapler was never more argument-averse than in his first managing gig, for Class-A Greenville (an affiliate of the Boston Red Sox) in 2007, when his team went 58-81.

“I brought a stoicism to the dugout that I don’t think worked very well,’’ he said, looking back. “And it was by design. I would have minor-league players come to me and complain about umpire calls. And I tried to help them put that aside.

“So I’d say something like, ‘How much value is there in you arguing balls and strikes? Like, do you think that there’s ever a strike or ball call changed?’ And I tried to rationalize with our players instead of getting with them on an emotional level.”

Kapler discovered over time that a raw young player who just struck out looking at a borderline slider was rarely of the mind to intellectualize the experience.

“What I found was that players really wanted to see me get upset about it,’’ he said. “So even though I was very rational about that moment, they wanted to see some anger.

“I started to make a little bit of an adjustment toward the end of the year. But I still felt pretty strongly that if I could just convince them to not spend their energy on that, then they could spend their energy on development and they could spend their energy on the right things in a baseball game.”

When Kapler became a big-league manager with the Phillies in 2018, he figured that his all-calm-and-reasonable act would play better with a mature roster. So he returned to his old ways and went the entirety of his rookie managerial season without getting the heave-ho.

“It was like, ‘I think I can help these players be stronger mentally and not get so spun,’’’ Kapler said. “But it just doesn’t work. They need to see you get upset.”

Last season, Kapler got tossed four times. And each time, he said, he bolted from the dugout as a bit of performance art. He wasn’t really erupting in anger, but players needed to see that he had their backs. (It’s worth noting here that Kapler, who was born in Hollywood, won a local Shakespeare Festival award for his performance in “The Taming of the Shrew” while in high school.)

“I never really lost my cool. I was upset, but I was also under control. I never felt like I couldn’t maintain control of my emotions during that time period,’’ Kapler said.

“But it doesn’t matter, me rationalizing my way through it. What matters is how the players feel and how the staff feels and how the ballpark feels and how the city feels and how the fans feel. And to some degree being responsive to that.”

This, in general, is how Kapler operates. It’s a theme that comes up over and over again. His managing style starts with his brain but occasionally, and increasingly, works its way down to his heart.

Whenever Kapler talks about the lessons he learned in Philadelphia, he invariably points to an instance in which he went by the book when he should have gone with his gut. (In fairness, managing with the gut might be difficult with six-pack abs.)

A favorite mistake came in Kapler’s first game, and it was one of the gaffes that prompted that Deadspin headline. In the Phillies’ season-opener on March 29, 2018, ace right-hander Aaron Nola carried a shutout into the sixth inning against the Atlanta Braves.

Nola’s pitch count was in the 60s without a hint of fatigue. Still Kapler had already drawn this up, he’d painstakingly scripted it and his plan meant summoning left-handed reliever Hoby Milner to face lefties Freddie Freeman and Nick Markakis.

Kapler recounted what happened next while talking to an intimate gathering of Giants season-ticket holders on Tuesday night.

“I began to manage the game on paper. And said that, ‘OK, I can convince myself that Aaron was slowing down a little bit and that it was right time to remove him from the game,’’’ he said. “And I managed the game on paper at that moment, brought Hoby Milner into the game and removed Aaron Nola, who was cruising.”

Milner promptly gave up a two-run homer to Freeman, the first batter he faced. The rest of the Phillies bullpen unraveled, too, as they blew a 5-0 lead and lost 8-5 on a three-run walk-off homer by Markakis.

Welcome to managing, Gabe Kapler.

“The lesson from all that is that I took a little bit of confidence away from Aaron Nola in that moment. I took a little confidence away from the dugout in that moment by trying to get every strategic advantage. And I took some confidence away from the clubhouse in that moment,’’ he told the audience.

“And the lesson in all of that is: Sometimes the best strategic advantage — the one that you’ve been thinking about for a really long time — isn’t worth the confidence being stripped away from the dugout, the clubhouse or the player.”

Posey, who attended Kapler’s introductory news conference, sitting quietly in the third row, said later that he likes the manager’s refined approach to information overload. Posey has come to much of the same belief behind the plate as a game caller. He is well-versed in scouting reports and various “hot zone” numbers regarding opposing hitters and minds them accordingly. But he also knows when to trust what he sees.

“We all know there’s a balance,’’ Posey said. “There are huge benefits to all the information. … To me, it’s about finding that right level for each player that you get the most out of them.

“Getting to talk to Gabe a little bit a few weeks back, I think he’s very aware of how different everybody’s personality and intake level may be for those kinds of things. Hopefully, he does do that and gets the best out of guys.”

Kapler approaches the dinner plate the same way he does a lineup card. Most of the time, he takes an analytical and measured approach.

But sometimes, he goes with his gut.

Earlier in November, Kapler went out to lunch with a candidate for the Giants’ pitching coach role. And hospitality aside, he ate only meat — no veggies, no bun, no sides. A few weeks later, he made an adjustment.

“Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday. And it’s not even close. I love to eat,’’ Kapler said. “I think there’s been this misconception that I’m some sort of robot.”

As a kid, both Gabe and his older brother Jeremy committed to fitness and a strict eating routine. But they circled the fourth Thursday in November on their calendars.

“We made a deal that on Thanksgiving, everything we ate was going to be just like the other side of the spectrum,’’ Kapler said. “We started the day with doughnuts and didn’t deprive ourselves of any volume. We ate as many doughnuts as we could possibly eat.”

Just like the pilgrims intended.

“Exactly,’’ Kapler said. “Sprinkles and all.”

Such a thoughtful approach to nutrition was a learned skill from his parents. In Judy and Michael’s household, food was organic. No junk food and little sugar. Maybe other kids ate packaged fruit roll-ups, but the Kapler boys ate dried apricots from the tree in the backyard. Michael made those himself on a drying rack he built and laid on the roof under the Southern California sun.

“All of my friends had white bread. They had processed food. And in my house, it was like granola and the very beginnings of wheat bread, which was gross, right?” Kapler said. “My friends had these awesome cakes but for my birthdays, we got carob cake. It was brutal.”

The spiciest thing at the dinner table was the conversation. Meals were served with a side of discussions on politics, race, feminism, social justice, music and certainly not sports.

Judy and Michael were both educators. Mom ran an early childhood center. She is the bulldog of the family, the one who can make life difficult for the airline customer service agent on the wrong end of a disputed charge. Dad was a music teacher and composer. Kapler says his father “represented the most sensitive and down-to-earth form of masculinity that I can possibly convey.”

They still live in that house in Reseda.

“Both of my parents were feminists,’’ Kapler said. “Both of them were active in the civil rights movement, active in the anti-war movement. Those were the values that I saw growing up.

“One of the mantras in my house was ‘challenge authority.’ And what they meant by ‘challenge authority’ was to ask a lot of questions. To this day, I spent a lot of time asking questions and I try to learn as much as I can.”

Judy and Michael are self-described hippies who met in New York as civil rights activists. That photo of MLK that Kapler plans hanging on the wall? It’s from King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” in 1963, when Kapler’s parents were among the crowd.

They also participated in the 1963 March on Washington protesting for jobs and against racial inequality; and were on the scene at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. At that last one, Judy spent her time bailing her fellow protestors out of jail.

Among Gabe’s vivid childhood memories are the times his father pulled the car over to spray paint a political message on a freeway overpass. Had Michael and Judy gone into baseball managing, they would have been ejected a lot.

“There was a lot of swearing in my house,’’ Kapler said, smiling. “It was the New York-loud debate style. That’s really what I had in my house. So with my mom and dad, there was a lot of debate, and even sometimes some raised voices and swearing.

“And it was OK. My brother and I would cuss and that was never a problem.”

Still, there was a line Gabe and his older brother, Jeremy, could not cross.

“What was a problem was anything derogatory,’’ Kapler said. “And my dad took major issue with it, so much so that if one us brought a joke home from school that was, like, racially charged in any way, hom*ophobic in any way, my dad was like: No.

“And then he would explain why even telling the joke was problematic in society, why even listening to somebody else tell those jokes and not saying ‘That’s not OK with me’ is problematic in society.”

Kapler referenced his upbringing more than once during his tumultuous introductory news conference. The San Francisco Chronicle has since reported that a 2017 MLB probe cleared Kapler of any wrongdoing in connection to the alleged assaults by Dodgers minor-leaguers two years earlier.

But questions persist about what Kapler should have done differently. The manager acknowledged that he asks himself the same thing and mentioned his parents a few times in that news conference as if to say: This is not how I was raised.

“I leaned on my mom pretty heavily through this process and for pretty obvious reasons,’’ Kapler told the crowded room of reporters. “I think if I could go back and do some of the Dodgers stuff different, I probably would have called my mom and asked her a few more questions about which steps to take. … I think this is the right time to say that I’m sorry that I didn’t make all the right moves with everything that I did.”

In a politically-charged household where lefties and righties had nothing to do with bullpen matchups, it’s a wonder Kapler found baseball at all. Television was mostly a no-no, and if it was on, the viewing was limited to PBS. “’Sesame Street’ was the only one that we were allowed to watch,’’ Kapler said.

Sports weren’t on the radar. His lone baseball story involving his family elders consists of his grandfather once showing him how to grip a curveball in the backyard. And that was it.

Kapler thinks he got started in baseball by emulating his brother, Jeremy. And even his baseball beginnings have a hippie vibe. Rather than splurging on the pricey Encino Little League, his parents signed him up for the laid-back recreation league at Reseda Park. Michael and Judy liked the rec league ethos of affordability, diversity and a more relaxed approach.

Kapler wound up digging the scene. He played baseball with an emphasis on play.

“It is the memory of baseball that I cherish the most,’’ he said from his office. “It was the most important part of my upbringing. It’s where I spent my entire day. Saturday mornings were me walking to the park and spending the entire day — no matter what time my game was — at the park, playing over-the-line between the fields and just being a kid.”

Eventually, he improved enough and grew competitive enough to switch over to the mighty Encino Little League. Kapler went on to become, in his words, a “very average” player for Taft High, where his fundamentals and hand-eye coordination were fine but undermined by an utter lack of power.

Finally, around age 18, Kapler packed on enough late-blooming muscle to earn a baseball scholarship to Cal State Fullerton. But Kapler flamed out quickly there, largely because he was more focused on his first serious girlfriend (and future wife, Lisa). It didn’t take long before legendary Fullerton coach Augie Garrido summoned Kapler into his office and revoked the scholarship. “You’re not ready for this,’’ the coach told him.

“He was right,’’ Kapler recalled, “and I knew he was right, but that was a very difficult call to make to my family.”

Kapler found his redemption at Moorpark College, a community college where the sports scene had the feel of his beloved park-and-rec league. This is where he found himself again.

“It wasn’t glitzy. It wasn’t glamorous. It was like, ‘OK, if you’re good enough, you’ll play. If you’re not, you won’t. So show up and be ready to get after it,’’’ Kapler said.

“And I did. I took that mentality. Show up and be ready to get after it. I did that for a long period of time, and I’m doing that still to this day.”

Kapler went on to have a 12-year big-league career, batting .268/.329/.420 over 2,983 career at-bats. He hit 82 homers, mostly as a fourth outfielder, and was out in right field when the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004. “I remember not being able to get a drop of spit in my mouth,’’ he remembered of that moment. “My mouth was so dry. And so there was much nervousness. It was such an out-of-body experience.”

In retrospect, career trajectory seems like ideal prep work for a future manager. Over the years, he was variably an underdog prospect as a 57th-round choice, a top prospect (.322, 28 homers, 146 RBIs for Double-A Jacksonville in 1998), an everyday regular, a platoon player, a pinch-runner and a defensive replacement.

Kapler once stole 23 bases in 29 attempts, for the Rangers in 2001. Would Kapler the manager let Kapler the player run that often?

“I wouldn’t let me run that much, no,’’ he said. “I wasn’t successful enough. … If I had me on the roster at the time, I would have much preferred to see 13 or 14 stolen bases, but at a higher percentage of success.”

As Kapler’s career wound down, he began trying to think along with his managers, studying the situations and matchups as a way of knowing when he might be called upon for late-inning duty.

Kapler began taking a sense of pride when sensing when, say, Red Sox manager Terry Francona or bench coach Brad Mills, suddenly turned to summon him for a particular situation.

“I was standing right next to them,’’ Kapler said. “I had my helmet on when there was an opportunity to pinch-hit.”

Kapler’s managerial philosophies came of age in the era of a major shift in the understanding and widespread acceptance of analytics. While with the Tampa Bay Rays, where Kapler played his final two seasons, a young front-office employee named Eric Neander approached him in the clubhouse one day in 2009 to talk to him about pitch selection.

Neander, who began his career at Baseball Info Solutions before becoming a Rays intern, asked Kapler what pitch he handled best.

Kapler answered without hesitation that he fared best against the pitch up in the zone.

“Most of that came from my feeling in batting practice, being able to see pitches up and around my chest in batting practice and hitting them out of the ballpark,’’ he said. “Obviously, that made me feel confident.”

It was also false.

Neander, now the Rays vice president of baseball operations, informed the longtime big-leaguer that he was much more successful against pitches in the bottom of the strike zone. And then Neander handed him all the game-day data that proved it. For the remainder of his career, Kapler took a new approach at the plate, hunting and attacking pitches at the bottom of the strike zone.

“So how analytical is that?” Kapler said. “It’s just reframing my focus as a player. ‘Here’s what you think you did well. It’s not actually true. Here’s what you actually do well. How can we put you in position to attack that pitch going forward?’

“That was the kind of information that I wanted to have.”

This story is representative of Kapler’s belief when it comes to metrics: They are tools that can make a player better. It’s a concept that can be far simpler than some make it out to be. He rejects the notion that there’s been any kind of analytics “revolution” led by nerds with calculators.

“That’s kind of bullsh*t, right? Analytics are every kids’ baseball card that they grew up with,’’ he said. “If you looked at batting average and home runs and doubles and triples and stolen bases and caught-stealings and all the things that we have on baseball cards as kids, that’s analytics.”

Sure, but baseball cards never had BABIP, FIP or DRC+ on the back.

“It’s only being labeled as different. It’s not different,’’ Kapler said. “We have different numbers, that’s true, but it’s not an ‘analytics revolution’ like we’ve made it out to be. … We just have better tools. We have more information. We have more numbers to use that predict future success.”

Still, Kapler’s numbers-oriented approach got him in trouble a few times in Philadelphia. In that fateful first week of 2018, his hyper-aggressive approach to the bullpen meant he needed to put a position player on the mound just a few games into the season. He once tried to make a pitching change before anyone had been given a chance to warm up.

Kapler also took dramatic approaches to defensive alignments, once having his right fielder play extremely shallow against Mets shortstop Ahmed Rosario because Kapler was “optimizing” for the ball to be hit to shallow right. Rosario promptly rocked the ball over the right fielder’s head.

Though Kapler said he has learned to be better about balancing the stats with feel, his lingering reputation is why one skeptic thinks that Kapler is the perfect cover for a front office that will be a metrics-run operation from the field on up.

“He’s not going to manage the Giants. He’s just going to be the manager. You see what I’m saying?’’ an industry source familiar with Kapler said. “It’s part of the new era. The manager doesn’t make decisions anymore. He is there, really, to keep the personalities together.”

Kapler reserves a special disdain for such opinions because he’s heard it before, including from his own players. Last year, Phillies outfielder Nick Williams, coming off a strong rookie season, was mostly in a reserve role early in 2019.

When asked why he was out of the lineup, Williams said: “I guess the computers are making it, I don’t know.”

Kapler handled that charge diplomatically at the time. But on Tuesday night, at the season-ticket holder event, he made an oblique reference to that incident while making a broader point. The manager never mentioned Williams by name but said that some situations don’t exactly require advanced metrics.

“I wanted to say, ‘No, you’re just not very good at baseball,’’’ Kapler recalled. “The reason he wasn’t playing is because he wasn’t producing. Sometimes, I think that gets lost, when people say that we’re making decisions based on numbers or stats. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of: We’re watching what’s happening.”

Williams batted .151/.196/.245 last season.

Just weeks into his tenure with the Giants, Kapler demonstrated a knack for late, pressure situations. At the gathering for season-ticket holders, an edgy crowd made for a tension-filled Q&A featuring both Kapler and Zaidi. Fans at the open-mic event brazenly questioned the direction of the franchise.

Kapler mostly rolled with a few passive-aggressive questions about his past. But a dramatic scene unfolded after the moderator said there was time for one more question.

A woman rose and fearlessly questioned the handling alleged 2015 assaults. She was upset with Kapler, and with Zaidi for hiring him.

“You’re saying character counts, which we’ve always felt has been the heart of this organization. So I need to address this to you: What were you thinking? In the Bay Area, what made you think that this was going to work?” she said. “Because all I’ve heard is PR sound bites. I haven’t heard anything that spoke to character and all the reasons people — women especially — are concerned about the role you’re taking on.”

The room went the kind of silent that’s actually loud.

Zaidi, as he had several times already that evening, talked about the thorough vetting process in hiring Kapler and the personal lessons both of them have learned through the process. Zaidi said he understood the backlash, welcomed the microscope, said the industry needed to be better about this important issue. He pledged that the organization was committed to speaking with actions, not words.

The question was answered, the tension defused. It looked as if the evening had come to a close.

Then Kapler raised his hand asked for a chance to respond, too.

“Can I ask your name please?” he said.

“My name is Pam.”

“Pam, I’m Gabe. Nice to meet you.”

There was some awkward laughter in the crowd.

“Any questions that you want to know about me, if you would give me a chance to prove that I have high character, I would love that opportunity,’’ he continued. “It doesn’t have to happen right now. It can happen whenever you want. But I’d also be more than happy to answer any of your questions without any sound bites — directly from my heart. Give me an opportunity to get to know me a little better.

“And I’ll make that commitment to anybody in this room: You can stay tonight and we’ll have that conversation. Or, if it makes you feel better, another time, I’m totally cool with that. I just want to ask that you give me a chance to prove my character to you before you decide my character.”

The ensuing applause was as loud as it had been all night.

— Reported from San Francisco

(File photo from Kapler’s introductory news conference: Eric Risberg / AP)