He’s a man who had never been booed –in 12 yearsof playing baseball in the big leagues. Well, almost never. Gabe Kapler did play for the Red Sox in Yankee Stadium, right? So there was that.
But mostly, Kapler says now, “I simply wasn’t a good enough player to get booed.”
“You have to be on the opposition’s radar for them to put in the effort,” he says. “Most of the time, I just wasn’t worth it.”
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But then came April 5 in South Philadelphia. In an overstuffed ballpark. In the home opener for one of baseball’s most closely watched teams. Maybe the new manager of the Phillies once looked at this day as a moment he’d been waiting for all his life. But welcome to Philly …
The land of the red, white and boo.
What happened that day was epic, even for Philadelphia. It was five games into the baseball season. It was the very same day as the euphoric victory parade for Villanova, your NCAA hoop champs. But if you thought all that winning was going to cause Philadelphians to skip through life – whistling, baking cookies and hugging strangers – settle down.
So naturally, when it came time to introduce the new manager, just six miles down Broad Street from the stage where ’Nova coach/deity Jay Wright was showered in love, the sound that greeted poor Gabriel S. Kapler was not what we’d describe as an expression of euphoria.
“Booooooooooo,” said 44,000 Philadelphians as the manager came bouncing out of the dugout. And “boooooooooo” would turn into the soundtrack of his day, his night, his week.
“Wow,” said one scout who was in attendance that day. “The booing that day was the worst I’ve ever seen – on Opening Day? For a manager? For a first-year guy? Oh my gosh. I felt bad for the guy.”
We should probably mention here thatsympathywould not be the first word we’d pick to describe how people from other teams generally feel about the new manager of the Phillies. But more on that later, because what really mattered that day was this:
Gabe Kapler was listening.
And by listening, we don’t just mean he was aware of the faint sound of disapproval off in the distance. We mean he was listening. Really listening. And asking himself a question that just about no one who has been booed ever asks:
When those folks were booing me, what were they trying to tell me?
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Maybe the reaction of most people who get booed in sports is something along the lines of: “Phgrxxzpthosestxnbrlflds.” But that was not the reaction of the manager of the Phillies.
His reaction, instead, was this: He’s a lover of information, in all its forms. And this, he realized, was actually a very important new piece of info – so he’d better pay attention to it.
“I believe that our fans matter,” Kapler told The Athletic this weekend, as his team was sweeping the Rays for its fourth, fifth and sixth wins in a row. “And [those fans] are the reason we’re able to do what we do.
“If they’re booing,” he said, “then I’m not doing my job well. I won’t dig in and become stubborn. Rather, it gave me the opportunity to challenge my own assumptions and, more specifically, the moves I make on behalf of our club. I examine why people are disappointed and whether it makes sense to alter course or stay with the current game plan. At the end of the day, our goals are the same – to win a lot of baseball games.”
Wait. What? Did we just hear a big-league manager say that booing – even when it’s coming from people shivering in an upper deck – was a reason to rethink the way he manages his team?
We knew Gabe Kapler was going to be different than maybe any manager who had ever done this job. But not that different.
He may be the first manager in history who ever wrote a blog post about the connection between lean tissue and drinking scotch while working out. He’s almost certainly the first manager in history who ever hung a quote from Simon Bolivar on his office wall. And if he isn’t the first manager in history who is clearly in better shape than every player on his team, there’s a really short list of others who even qualify for that debate.
But listening to booing customers and then reflecting on how he can derive something deep and meaningful from those boos? Now we’re really into uncharted territory.
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“I am very committed to learning and getting better every way I can,” the manager went on. “Fans don’t boo for no reason. They’re attempting to communicate with me. It’s my job to never reject any source of information that can lead to my getting better, no matter who is giving me that information or what form it comes in.”
So what did he re-evaluate? What assumptions did he challenge? What has he changed? We’ll get back to that, too. But first, it’s important to ask the fundamental question here:
What exactly, in the grand scheme of the baseball cosmos, was the vital, life-changing information that was truly being communicated by those thunderous boos?
It’s actually not that simple a question. It’s definitely not that simple an answer. Because not every boo carried the same meaning. Let’s take a stab at this. We see three distinct themes behind those boos. They seemed to be saying all of these things …
1.You don’t know what the hell you’re doing, pal.
2.Can you please take those newfangled analytics of yours, set them on fire, then pack up those scented candles in your office and never come back?
3.Why the heck did they fire Pete Mackanin anyway?
All of that was in there, disguised as just the usual high-decibel grumbling of folks who believe that booing is one of their fundamental rights as patriotic Americans. Now here’s a look inside each of those messages.
Kapler and his infielders on April 8 against the Marlins (Photo: Mitchell Leff/Getty Images)
1.You don’t know what the hell you’re doing, pal.
Gabe Kapler’s team was 1-4 as it took the field for that home opener. He’d had a rough first five games, packed with a succession of backfiring maneuvers, no matter how well-conceived or well-intentioned. Just that fast, apparently, Philadelphia had already decided this wasn’t what it signed up for.
He’d pulled Aaron Nola on Opening Day, 68 pitches into a three-hit shutout that turned into a blown five-run lead.Two days later, he’d signaled for a reliever (Hoby Milner) who had never warmed up. Then his team lost back-to-back games in New York on plays that seemed to revolve around unorthodox, metric-based defensive positioning that didn’t work.
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By the time the Phillies returned home, a ridiculous number of otherwise-sane Philadelphians had concluded that Gabe Kapler was a disaster. After five games.
“You know what those boos said to me?” mused the same scout quoted earlier. “They told me: ‘This is Philadelphia. You’re not gonna embarrass us.’”
For his part, the manager was humbled – but hearing a slightly different message, a boo-print he thought he might just be able to learn a valuable lesson from.
“I think the boos were saying that I haven’t built up enough trust with fans yet,” Kapler said. “Each decision in the first two series [other than waving in a reliever still wearing his warmup jacket] had a lot of reasons behind it, but that isn’t good enough. The results weren’t there. I’m new to this team and this city, and the only thing fans have to judge me on is the results on the field. My intentions don’t matter. This is a city prepared to ‘trust the process,’ but they expect to see it be successful.”
So it was time, he deduced, to figure out ways he could build that trust. But that wasn’t all he was dealing with.…
2.Can you please take those newfangled analytics of yours, set them on fire, then pack up those scented candles in your office and never come back?
Philly talk-show caller: “It’s theanalytics, Mike. The analytics don’t work. And these guys are trying to jam them down our throats. These guys need to go back to playing baseball the way we’ve played it for a hundred years. What’s wrong with the way we won the World Series in ’08?”
The City of Brotherly Love’s referendum on analytics should have been held years ago. Maybe a decade ago. Unfortunately for Philadelphia, it just took a little longer for the computer programmers to arrive in their town than it did in most of baseball-playing America.
By the time Gabe Kapler aligned his first shift, you’d have thought the fans in his metropolis would have gotten the memo. Do they really think that – thatthe analytics don’t work?The analytics totally work, when implemented properly, over a long period of time. They just don’t work on every play of every game – kind of like positioning your shortstop where Honus Wagner used to stand wouldn’t work on every play.
But when they didn’t work so hot over the first five games of 2018 for this team, that sound you heard was millions of knees jerking all over Philadelphia. And it was the manager who bore the brunt of that rebellion.
“You know the interesting thing about what we’re seeing,” said Phillies general manager Matt Klentak, “is that while some of what we’re doing this year is different to the Phillies, very little of what we’re doing is unique or different in baseball.”
Good point. He then chose to drop a few names – of teams that have been known to break out the spreadsheets and have done OK with it over the last couple of years. Like the Astros. And the Cubs. And the Dodgers.
“So the Phillies are not breaking new ground in most of these areas relative to the rest of the league,” Klentak said. “I do understand that a lot of this is new to the Phillies. And for that reason, we have to be sensitive to the way that it is implemented. But this is not the case of a radical GM or a radical manager being dismissive of baseball history. This is an organization that is sensitive to what has been successful in baseball over the last few years and trying to make ourselves successful.”
But in the meantime, that organization also hired a manager who doesn’t fit inside any box that anyone in his city is familiar with. That, in itself, is an issue – because change is hard. It’s hard to understand. It’s hard to accept. It’s always hard. Especially when it misfires as dramatically as it misfired in the new manager’s first week on the job.
That’s why the GM would like to remind his fans that, as messed up as all that got, change is actually good – if it’s done right and you give it enough time to let it be done right.
“I think the thing that resonates with me, and I suspect it resonates with Philadelphia sports fans,” Klentak said, “is that the Philadelphia Eagles probably don’t win the Super Bowl by punting on 4thand 2. The Philadelphia 76ers don’t get to where they are today by half-assing a rebuild. These teams committed to doing things the right way, strategically implementing change, and they went through some difficult times along the way.…
“And as an organization,” he went on, “as much as we have to live in the here and now, and understand why boos are happening or why certain columns are being written, we also have to keep our eye on the prize, which is to build a team that sustains its winning ways for a long, long time. But will there be growing pains along the way? Yes.”
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As accurate and philosophical as that reasoning may be, is it OK to observe here that when Philadelphians feel that pain, they have a time-honored means of expressing it? And it rhymes withzooooooo…
3.Why the heck did they fire Pete Mackanin anyway?
The dismissal of the previous manager of the Phillies last September was a fascinating move. And not just in the city where Pete Mackanin had coached and managed since 2009 – but around a sport that universally likes and respects him.
Mackanin’s contract had been extended last May. His team had then played its tails off down the stretch, going 38-38 in its final 76 games. But the Phillies nudged him into a special-advisor role anyway – and went off in search of a manager who could kick-start a young team into the next stage of its journey back to contention.
That decision raised eyebrows far beyond the city limits of Philadelphia. It caused a major ripple throughout the industry – a ripple that quickly transitioned into a tsunami when the team hired 42-year-old Gabe Kapler as Mackanin’s replacement.
You wouldn’t think, in theory, that a guy who spent 15 years as a professional baseball player, another as a minor-league manager and three more as the Dodgers’ director of player development would have been so widely perceived as an outside-the-box choice. But in a sport still populated by many folks who think managers should look like Jim Leyland, walk like Bobby Cox and talk like Joe Torre, the view from coast to coast seemed to be that Gabe Kapler was so outside the box, he didn’t even know there was a box.
Maybe those folks had read his blogs. Maybe they’d been told a story from his occasionally stormy tenure with the Dodgers. Maybe they’d just heard tales of his new-age manager’s office, replete with burning candles, inspirational sayings scrawled on a chalk board and blue-green lighting. But whatever. From the moment Kapler stumbled in his first week as a manager, the reaction from a shocking number of people around baseball was:Ha. Told ya so.
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“I’d say 90 percent of that was people wanting this guy to fail, just because he isn’t like them,” said one NL exec. “So they were hoping he falls on his face and the Phillies were going to have to change managers like six weeks into the season.”
Well, that was never going to happen. But it’s a reminder of how hard it is to be different in a sport so rooted in the virtues ofThis is how we’ve always done it.It was also a reminder of how suspiciously many of these same people once viewed the arrival of another manager who didn’t walk, talk or think like them.
That guy was Joe Maddon. But not the now-famous Joe Maddon. It’s hard to remember, but when Maddon first arrived in Tampa Bay in 2006 for his first big-league managing job, the baseball chorus was singing a very similar tune. Gabe Kapler knows all about that – because he once played for Maddon and because he spent so much time last winter picking Maddon’s brain.
“One of the things Joe said to me that I’ll never forget,” Kapler said this spring, “was,`Embrace being different. Don’t try to be like everybody else because it won’t work.’ And I think there is something inside of us, as baseball men, that always pushes us to conform because it’s so much safer to conform and you’re accepted so much easier if you’re in a room and you speak like the other men in the room.
“What it taught me is that it’s OK. I don’t speak like the other men in the room, and I don’t necessarily think like the other men in the room, and not to shy away from that, but to embrace and be OK with it.”
But when we asked Maddon, during spring training, about those conversations, he had two observations that ring truer than ever right now.
—“He’s going to do some things that people aren’t going to get or understand,” Maddon said. “Especially in Philadelphia. Oh my God. You talk about the bastion of conservativism when it comes to playing baseball. My God.”
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OK, he’s 1-for-1 there. But Maddon also said this:
—“Hey listen, until the first bomb falls, you have no clue. And not only that. It’s about the first five or six-game losing streak. That’s when you really figure it out. And that’s when you get tested, because that’s when your theories get tested. And if you’re not really solid in what you believe in and then you waver, that’s when the cracks appear. So that’s where knowing what you want to do and how you want to do it matters.”
Well, that first bomb has fallen, all right. But what happened next wasn’t quite what he’d envisioned – because whaddayaknow, Gabe Kapler decided that bomb was actually telling him something. And it wasn’tjust kaboom.
By the end of his first home stand, the boos had almost faded. But a week later, even as his team was ripping off eight wins in nine games, the manager hadn’t forgotten them.
He isn’t finished being different. He is just getting started. So he knows those boos will be back. And he thinks he understands now where the boos are coming from.
“This year is very different from what fans are used to,” Kapler said. “I understand that. I think any time there are changes, there is inherently some discomfort. That’s natural and human. If I had to say, though, I’d say that I made a lot of calls early on that visibly didn’t work. Philly fans don’t hold back when decisions don’t work.”
Hey, ya think? But he has also decided that he’s cool with that.
“We cannot be invested, or have our egos tied into any one way of looking at the world,” the manager said. “We – and I – will be judged based on whether we succeed or fail, not based on whether we were conventional or novel in our way of thinking.”
Nevertheless, he has used their judgment as inspiration to adjust his thinking. So how has he changed? What has he changed? What will he change in the future?
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He chose not to be specific about his in-game decision-making. But it was notable that the Phillies just went through a five-game stretch in which their starting pitchers averaged 97 pitches and faced an average of 26 hitters per start. And scouts in attendance thought Kapler clearly had decided to dial back his early inclination to over-manage his pitching staff.
“He had an idea early on of what he wanted to do and how he wanted to do it, and it blew up on him very quickly,” said one scout. “So to have it blow up in your face in a town like Philadelphia, I think it affects you. Let’s just say he had a moment.”
But what he also had was a realization that if he wanted to build trust in his town, he was going to need to do a dramatically better job of letting the town in on the thinking behind what it was watching.
“I think the very first thing I learned,” Kapler said of the booing, “is that people generally feel better when they know what to expect.”
When Jake Arrieta makes his first start after an abbreviated spring training and has to leave the game after 75 pitches, nobody boos – because “everyone knew” that was coming. But as Kapler looked back on his quick hook of Nola on Opening Day, he realized he should have done a better job of sharing the reasoning behind that decision.
“When asked about it in the following days, my reaction was that I’d do the same thing,” Kapler said. “Based on fan reaction, I’d change that answer. I’d explain better that we had a specific plan to build up Nola and stretch him out dating back to spring training, and that plan was put together by our entire group working together.”
That plan was linked to all sorts of factors that applied just to that specific game – the lineup they were facing, the quick turnaround for Nola’s next scheduled start, the options presented by a nine-man bullpen, etc. But Kapler explained almost none of that after that game. Now he believes that he “could have done a much better job sharing that the strategy on Opening Day was a strategy solely for that situation, not indicative of a season-long plan.”
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But no matter how many questions a manager answers, they keep on coming. And winning streaks don’t solve every problem, they just turn down the volume. And one set of lessons learned don’t mean that all the lessons have been learned. Gabe Kapler’s adventures in proving himself aren’t in the rear-view mirror. They’re just finishing up Chapter One.
Let’s not forget he still hasn’t managed 20 big-league baseball games yet. Stuff. Will. Happen. His GM is ready for that stuff – and all that goes with it.
“We know that any rookie manager is going to go through some growing pains,” Klentak said. “They’re not going to be perfect on day one. In whatever job that we have, no one is ever perfect on day one. So we go into the season knowing that. We are going to work with Kap. We are going to support him. We are going to work with him to get better. I can tell you… we have already seen him stumble and learn from it and make adjustments. And that’s going to continue to happen.”
Nevertheless, we’re talking about a man who will never win a Lou Piniella look-alike contest. We’re talking about a man who will always burn his candles, quote Albert Einstein and look at the world in ways that will make a lot of traditional thinkers in his sport roll their eyeballs. But that, said Gabe Kapler, isn’t a reason to conform. It’s just more reason to innovate.
“It is easier to walk the road that has always been walked,” he said. “It’s comfortable and doesn’t expose you when you do so. One of the things I’ve always believed, however, is that if we want to be better than the pack, we have to do things differently than the pack.”
So if the boos rain down again, he’ll be listening. But if they don’t, he’ll be grateful.
“I hope so,” he said, “because if I don’t hear any more boos, it means we’re winning.”
(Top photo of Kapler: Mitchell Leff/Getty Images)
