I’ll be there in the stands at Oracle Park tonight with my brother Dave, 50 years after we first went to a Giants game together. As silly as it sometimes seems to care about sports, amid all the hype, over-packaging, and pop-star-sized compensation, something about this year’s Giants team feels fresh and fun and even special.
I offered Major League Baseball some tough-love advice in a New York Times column I wrote in July 2020, during the sport’s covid hiatus, and said what baseball needed was “to appeal to both hard-core and casual fans and especially to younger viewers by highlighting baseball’s natural propensity for unforeseen twists and turns and the human reactions they inspire.”
That’s exactly what the Giants have done. An argument has been roiling the sports world for years, and San Francisco is once again at the forefront of reminding people what baseball can mean to a community: it can be fun, and it can bring people together.
That’s true even when you’re at the forefront of the analytics revolution in sports. The hilarious irony of this year’s Giants season — now rolling into the glare of primetime with tonight’s home National League Division Series game — is that for all the talk of team president Farhan Zaidi’s PhD from Berkeley and love of analytics, this is a team that is winning using old-school methods with a new-school sheen.
How did manager Gabe Kapler and his utterly unlikely coaching staff get so much this season out of linchpins Buster Posey and Brandon Crawford, both 34, longtime wingman Brandon Belt, 33, and reclamation project Evan Longoria, 35? They talked to them. At length. And talked some more.
I’m reminded of a line from my friend Joe Plumeri, who convinced management of the Sears Tower in Chicago to change the name of the iconic building to “Willis Tower.” How did Joe, then CEO of Willis, get them to make the change, Tom Brokaw asked him.
“I asked!” Joe explained.
The Giants asked. They asked for these four — who have led the Giants’ offense all season, along with 34-year-old Darin Ruf — to be open-minded about the Kapler approach after years of our old friend Bruce Bochy at the helm. Believe me, I’ve covered baseball professionally since the ’90s and big-league teams are not in general very good at listening. General managers and team presidents spend a lot of their time during games wondering why players seem so often to be off doing their own thing. Not with this year’s Giants.
Interviews with players show the coaching staff and organization have been energetic and imaginative and relentless in building a deep rapport and deep two-way communication with players. It’s fascinating to watch this unfold and helps explain the great, feel-good vibe the team projects every day, which manifests itself in crisp, clean, confident execution on the field and relaxed comeback after relaxed comeback. The fresh insights of smart cutting-edge analytic tools and a commitment to the human side add up to something powerful that is making many in baseball pay heed.
I’ll be blunt and say my first impressions of Kapler were not all positive. I authored a book called One Day at Fenway, all about a single Red Sox-Yankee game in 2003, and Kapler was on that Boston team. Nothing I heard from him, saw of him, or heard about him moved the needle. He struck me as a borderline big-leaguer.
But Kapler spent twelve seasons in the big leagues, and then got a whirlwind education as a front-office guy afterward, and when I talked to him in San Francisco earlier this season, I was encountering a different man than I’d met 18 years earlier. He was confident and alert but also in a way modest, taking in questions with the same kind of focus a hitter in a groove applies to watching for the break on an incoming pitch. Kapler showed me the distinctive confidence of a man who knew his work was paying off and the hungry curiosity of someone who can’t wait to see if this team can keep the winning going right through to another World Series in the beautiful park with a view of the Bay.
I expect a genuine, palpable excitement in the air tonight at the ballyard with the electricity of October baseball and the added energy of Giants-Dodgers games. It’s a feeling that comes along now and then, a variant on the old ’60s lyric “something’s happening here.”
This year’s Giants strike a lot of people as having a great shot of making it all the way to the World Series, which (sing along) they won in 2010, 2012, and 2014, all years when coming out of spring no one projected them to do anything special.
For all the talk of launch angles and exit velocity, baseball is about fear and mastering that fear: fear of being struck in the head with a ball, fear of failure, fear of coming up short in the eyes of teammates. This is a front-office-led era of baseball, but smart teams understand they still need their field manager as a critical part of both executing and building the team philosophy.
So I say to the casual fan: Check it out! Come on out to a game, or stop off at your favorite dive in SF or around the Bay Area, and tune in a little as postseason baseball unfolds. The Giants have the best broadcasters in baseball (I’d give the Mets a close second), with Jon Miller, Mike Krukow, Duane Kuiper, and Dave Flemming, and they make every game broadcast fun and flavorful. (As a former “Airwaves” columnist for the Chronicle, I rank the current Giants broadcast team as among the best ever in baseball.)
Here’s what I’d love to see: More conversation about baseball that focused on heart, determination, on the little things that make a difference when you’re trying to connect with someone. Zaidi is brilliant — like his mentor in Oakland, Billy Beane, who may well end up with the Mets next year— and so might Kapler be: But if so, their brilliance lies in releasing the genius of the men they’re paying to play a boy’s game under the bright lights of pressure and scrutiny. The more we tune into that unfolding drama, the more we see of humanity.
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