Philadelphia Phillies: Will Kapler’s Gabeness leak away?

Philadelphia Phillies manager Gabe Kapler is who he is, but that may not be a positive.

A recent article by Philly.com’s skilled, veteran writer Bob Brookover obliquely addressed a question quietly plaguing Philadelphia Phillies fans for months now: Will manager Gabe Kapler be less like himself in 2019 than he was last season?

Oh, Brookover didn’t put it quite that way or reveal why that question would even be asked by Phillies fans because 1) he has to deal with Kapler directly as part of his job, and 2) everybody in the City that Hates You Back knows what the underlying issue is with the manager. Kapler’s Gabeness, which could be called “round,” hasn’t quite fit into the “square” space Philly provides for its sports figures.

This stems from a three specific historical “things” – some non-traditional notions Kapler introduced last spring, from the manager’s verbal style, and from his pulling Aaron Nola just a bit early in the Phillies opener last season, resulting directly (many argued) in a loss.

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Just about a year ago, some of those non-traditional notions surfaced. As was reported on Valentine’s Day ’18, Kapler had given his players a great big box of chocolate wonderfulness as Spring Training started. The original reports many heard on sports talk radio were both very intriguing and slightly inaccurate: Kapler was throwing discipline out the window, allowing his players to show up for their late winter workouts whenever they felt like rolling out of bed, and requiring his well-rested team to document all their throws and batting swings. Those two notions alone seemed like a horseman jumping on two different horses at the same time and riding off in different directions.

Or as one Phillies fan put it to me: “The guy’s a jackass.”

Neither of these descriptions of team activities as put up above was entirely accurate, but players did show up to the first Camp Kapler somewhat later. No one, seemingly, knows what became of Phillies documentation of their activities in ’18. However, this time last year, Gabe Kapler was a bit “touchy-feely” for the taste a lot of Delaware Valley baseball fans.

A Change Coming?

This will change somewhat for the coming season. The title of Brookover’s piece features “more boundaries” and “pressure,” and another report about the same time noted Maikel Franco had dropped 10 pounds in the off season, which is a good thing because A) Franco has always struggled a bit with conditioning, and B) this season he will have to compete with Scott Kingery for time at third base.

(Insert joke here about the potential untimeliness of this article if the Phillies sign…what’s that guy’s name? You know….)

Last season, Kingery’s first in MLB, the Phillies told him he would be moved all over the field. This year third base seems up for grabs at least temporarily, and while Franco has slimmed down to compete for his job, Kingery has apparently added 15 pounds of muscle.

Kapler:  “[W]e’re going to implement systems and processes and boundaries that make it clear that we are here to work every single day.” Re: Franco and Kingery’s competition:  “[T]hat’s a conversation that I’ll have with Mikey and I’ll have with Scott.”

Philadelphia Phillies

OK, let’s go back to that “Mikey,” which speaks to the second item listed as an issue for Kapler – his verbal style. One hates to pick on people for verbal habits, which everyone has, but Kapler has an annoying tendency to refer to his players by diminutives, suggesting he should be writing copy for breakfast products. “Mikey” is a character in a 1972 Life Cereal ad, not the Phillies third baseman. (The memorable line was, “Give it to Mikey – he won’t eat it, he hates everything,” but widely misquoted.) No one but Gabe Kapler refers to Franco as ”Mikey.” No one but Kapler refers to Aaron Nola as “Nolie.”

Those Word Salads

This is a minor point, however. Worse are the word salads Kapler inflicts on Phillies fans, one of which Brookover quoted at length, this one in regard to Kapler’s spending time in Philadelphia over the off season when, he told another reporter last October, he hoped fans would “[c]ome with the questions that you called into the radio station with, come with the questions that you screamed into your computer with, and let’s talk it through. I’ll show you and I’ll share with you how those decisions were being made. I think what might happen over the course of time is people would see me as less ‘out there.’ We have to work hard — and we should have to work hard — to market and convince our fan base that the decisions we make are rooted in a tremendous amount of research and care. And there’s never anything that is flippant. It’s our responsibility to message that effectively. That doesn’t mean we’re going to win everybody over. But at least we keep working at it, we keep trying to communicate, we keep trying to share the vision, and we’ll acquire a larger degree of trust.”

These questions were possibly going to happen at town-hall style meetings. No one has mentioned such meetings since October, or else they were kept a pretty good secret. Maybe Kapler had some informal meetings with fans; maybe there was even an event with forward publicity.

The point is no one ever challenged for parking too close to a fire hydrant or a driveway in South Philly has ever responded, “I must message that this visit will be brief. I hope to effectively enact decisions rooted in tremendous thought ensuring that.”

Similarly, while Kapler wants more boundaries this spring, and will pressure his Phillies, he isn’t throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.  He told Brookover that, along with his new, tighter rules, “[l]ast year, I stressed that we wanted players to be able to be themselves and to be celebrated for who they were, and we’re going to continue to stress that.”

No matter. Winning will cure all these issues, but it’s fairly clear Philadelphia Phillies manager Gabe Kapler is still a guy who would really, really like to ride two horses off in two different directions.