The 2021 Giants, part 2

I've said it before and I repeated it in my last post: this is the most interesting Giants team in my tenure as a fan. What's so interesting? Let's start with the manager, Gabe Kapler. This is a man who leaves nothing to chance. Every action has a purpose. Even warm-up tosses are conscious, deliberate acts with clear outcomes. This approach, at first blush, seems too hands-on for pro athletes and more suited to working with elementary school kids. But Kapler believes that every athlete (every person, in fact) can learn, adapt, and grow. Practice isn't just drills. It's a personal improvement plan. Kap's forte is player development, and he believes that this process happens continuously and throughout all the things that happen in the season from Spring Training to the playoffs to the layoffs.

Kapler is also match-up obsessed. He believes that every encounter can be maximized and that even the tiniest increment in your favor is worth pursuing. It drove the old-school purists in Philadelphia crazy, and to Kap's credit he adjusted his schemes when he came to San Francisco. Mostly, he asked the veteran players for buy-in beforehand and they were professional enough (and hungry enough for increasingly elusive success) to meet him halfway. The result? Career resurgences for BCraw, Belt, Buster, and Longo, and a rejuvenated nucleus of veteran leaders to build a team around.

Ron put it crudely in the comments: "making Lemonade out of Lemons." I have to counter that notion just a bit: there are no "lemons" in a Gabe Kapler organization! The baseball world may look at the Giants lineup of no-names and think the team was scraped together by dumpster-diving and somehow these marginal players were transformed by SF secret sauce into winners. It's a nice narrative, but it's bullshit. Kap respects professional baseball players. He knows they are talented and ambitious. He sees what they CAN do and not what they CAN'T do. Very few players reach the heights of someone like Mookie Betts or Max Scherzer. The vast majority of players will never be superstars. MOST ballplayers are more like Darin Ruf and Jose Alvarez! What the Giants do is recognize what contributions their players CAN make and so they maximize their chances to make those contributions. Moreover, they provide the coaching and instructional support to help players work on the things they need to work on.

Giants players noted all season long Kap's willingness to listen. Kap, in turn, noted again and again how unselfish the players were in accepting whatever role the team needed from them. I think the skipper gets a lot of credit for creating that culture. One thing that stood out for me: if a reliever blew up in a crucial spot in a game Kap would put him back out there in a key spot in the next game. It was a message that said "we trust you and we have your back." It seems like really simple schoolyard stuff but it makes a huge deal in a teaching environment. The clubhouse was as much a classroom as the playing field.

Have you ever seen a manager pinch-hit for a guy that was 2-for-2 with a homer? Or sit a guy with the game-winning homer the previous night? It happened all season long! And the hitters never bitched or whined. They knew the system was working for them individually and for the team as a whole. The 2021 Giants had few regulars. They platooned like they invented platooning. They looked like a hockey team some nights the way they ran through the line changes. That's not supposed to work. You're supposed to plug in your All-Stars every day in the same spots on the field and in the lineup and go with that all season long. This Giants team didn't do that. They used all forty men on their 40-man roster. It was a team in the true sense of the word.

I find all this modern stuff really interesting. I've really enjoyed the emergence of analytics, for example. I feel like all that stuff just enriches and enlarges my appreciation of the game. And now Kapler comes along and says things like "trust the process." Imagine a manager saying that back in the day. They would have thought he was a fruit loop who belonged at Esalen instead of MLB! Kap comes up with stuff that sounds like it emerged from a Bayesian workflow seminar instead of a coaches meeting.

In the end, the Giants won 109 games.

--M.C.