This wasn’t supposed to happen again.
Gabe Kapler was supposed to learn from those early mistakes. He would have his relievers warmed and ready when he called for them. His communication with his coaching staff would be airtight. From the first pitch to the last, no detail would escape his notice.
He publicly and blatantly slipped up in his first week on the job with the Philadelphia Phillies in 2018.
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On Thursday night, at the end of his first week on the job with the Giants, he publicly and blatantly slipped up again.
He walked onto the field in the 10th inning of the Giants’ 12-7 loss to the San Diego Padres at Oracle Park and signaled for right-hander Rico Garcia to replace right-hander Tyler Rogers. But Giants pitching coach Andrew Bailey had just returned to the dugout following his own mound visit.
According to Rule 5.10 (l), if a pitcher is visited twice by a manager or coach in the same inning within the span of the same at-bat, then the pitcher is required to face the batter until the batter is retired or reaches base. Then and only after then, that pitcher must be replaced.
Rogers had gotten all the way to the Giants dugout before umpires told him to return to the mound. He threw one pitch, the Padres’ Austin Hedges laid down a successful squeeze and then Kapler came back out to signal for Garcia one more time.
It did not make a difference in the outcome — the Padres already had tallied a four-run lead against Rogers — but it was an extremely bad look for a major-league manager. And it was an especially pointed blow for Kapler, a deeply divisive hire among Giants fans who is seeking to rebuild his reputation while also replacing a managerial icon in Bruce Bochy.
At least Kapler learned how to handle the fallout a little better. He sought to get in front of the issue in his postgame Zoom call before taking questions from reporters.
“I’ll open it up here,” Kapler said. “I know everybody’s going to be asking about going to get Rogers when I did and that was just a mental screw-up on my part. I’ve been around the game for a long time and I just had a lapse in memory.
“Things in the dugout, we were talking about a lot of different things. I hopped out there and went and got him, and obviously, that was just a mental screw-up on my part. I just wanted to own that. It’s 100 percent my responsibility.”
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At least Kapler signaled for a reliever, Garcia, who had warmed up. It was his failure to warm up Phillies reliever Hoby Milner that set off so much consternation at the outset of his tenure in Philadelphia.
Then and now, his opening series with a new club involved a carousel of unconventional pitching changes.
Things were supposed to settle down for the Giants, beginning with this home-opening series against the Padres. So much for that.
The Giants were playing their first extra-inning game under modified rules for this season. They were experiencing their first automatic runner at second base to start the inning. It did not go well. Rogers worked the ninth but remained in the game in the hope that his submarine delivery might induce a ground ball that could lead to an out at third base. But he walked Manny Machado on five pitches. Tommy Pham singled. Jurickson Profar was hit by a pitch. Greg Garcia singled. So did Ty France.
All the while, Garcia and Trevor Gott were throwing in the bullpen. Kapler stayed with Rogers, still hoping for ground-ball outs.
Then when he went out to replace him, he couldn’t.
“I really didn’t know what was happening at the time,” Giants first baseman Brandon Belt said. “I didn’t know what was happening afterwards. I just assumed it was some new rule that we made a mistake.”
It was not a new rule. In fact, it’s a familiar one to shrewd Giants fans.
It was the same rule that Bochy seized upon in a 2010 game at Dodger Stadium when acting manager Don Mattingly visited closer Jonathan Broxton on the mound, began to walk back to the dugout and then turned around to offer additional instructions. Bochy bolted from the dugout to point out that by rule, Mattingly had made a second visit. The umpires agreed, and although they improperly applied the rule by forcing Broxton from the game, the Giants rallied for an important victory. Years earlier while managing the Padres, Bochy had caught Dodgers manager Grady Little on the double-visit rule as well.
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That moment and that Mattingly double-back was the turning point for Bochy among many Giants fans, who until then had held a limited view of him as a dim, slow-talking managerial retread. That was the moment when many fans understood that Bochy was as keen a dugout observer as the game had ever produced. That was when Giants fans knew without a doubt that their manager was an asset.
What must those fans think of Kapler now? How does his reputation recover from this?
“I think the most important thing is I just own it and take responsibility for it,” he said, “and don’t make the same mistake twice.”
Kapler did avoid those early bullpen mistakes over the remainder of his two-season tenure with the Phillies, which ended with a pair of mediocre records and his termination with one year remaining on his contract. He also had seasoned bench coach Rob Thomson to help ensure that he didn’t skip over any details within the game.
Kapler does not have a seasoned bench coach who can lean upon years of experience to help keep him in check now. Kai Correa is a 32-year-old with no major-league playing or coaching experience who was an infield instructor in the Cleveland Indians system last year. Third-base coach Ron Wotus is the longest-tenured coach in Giants history and has served as a bench coach to Bochy in addition to Felipe Alou and Dusty Baker. But he is just one of 13 coaches on the major-league staff. That makes for a lot of talking heads for a manager who still has just two ears.
Rogers ended up throwing just one more pitch after he re-entered in the 10th. The Padres took advantage of the Giants’ confusion to execute a squeeze play. Tyler Heineman was unable to field it and pivot back to the plate in time to apply the tag as the Padres took two of three in the series.
What did Rogers think when Kapler almost immediately followed up Bailey’s visit?
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“Gabe came and got the ball from me so I walked into the dugout,” Rogers said. “That’s what it was. Then they told me I had to go back out. So no big deal. Just roll with it. … It wasn’t a big deal for me to lock it back in.”
Rogers said that Kapler communicated with him after the game.
“Gabe is a standup guy and when he makes a mistake, he’ll be the first one to say it,” Rogers said. “I told him it’s OK. If I would have pitched a little better, he wouldn’t have had to do that.”
Kapler made other curious decisions in the game. He used Austin Slater as a pinch hitter for Brandon Crawford but then didn’t keep Slater in the game, instead burning Mauricio Dubón. Yet he also let Heineman hit for himself with the go-ahead runs on base in the eighth.
He used 37-year-old Hunter Pence as a pinch-runner for Wilmer Flores following a leadoff single in the ninth. It was Pence’s first career pinch-running appearance. Then Kapler made no attempt to advance Pence with a steal attempt or a bunt. Dubón lined out, Heineman flied out and Steven Duggar was called out on strikes.
With no access other than the stifled medium of postgame Zoom calls, it will be difficult to gauge how this incident will reverberate within the clubhouse. Giants veterans praised Kapler’s energy and innovation in spring training and signaled their willingness to be open to new ideas. Yet during the season-opening series at Dodger Stadium, pitchers Kevin Gausman and Johnny Cueto also made it clear that they preferred a more traditional structure that delineates starters from relievers. Jeff Samardzija is another vocal adherent to the old school.
The rebuilding Giants have plenty of young players who are happy to be here. But a manager has nothing without his reputation, starting with his dependability to make the right moves and his powers of observation to put players in the best positions to succeed.
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All of that work to build faith — at the introductory news conference, in spring training, in the modified camp in July — is imperiled now. Kapler’s growth mindset allows for learning from mistakes. But this is the big leagues. Repeating them is seldom tolerated.
And because Farhan Zaidi expended a significant amount of his own capital to hire Kapler, his reputation will be at stake, too.
Kapler has never shied away from putting himself out there. He wants to be liked, of course, but he also makes himself an easy target. The target just got bigger.
The double-visit rule became a defining moment for one Giants manager. Now it could define another manager in a much less flattering way.
— Reported from San Francisco
(Photo: Jeff Chiu / Associated Press)
Andrew Baggarly is a senior writer for The Athletic and covers the San Francisco Giants. He has covered Major League Baseball for more than two decades, including the Giants since 2004 for the Oakland Tribune, San Jose Mercury News and Comcast SportsNet Bay Area. He is the author of two books that document the most successful era in franchise history: “A Band of Misfits: Tales of the 2010 San Francisco Giants” and “Giant Splash: Bondsian Blasts, World Series Parades and Other Thrilling Moments By the Bay.” Follow Andrew on Twitter @extrabaggs
