Former Giants manager Gabe Kapler had some interesting plans for his time away from baseball before he took the Miami Marlins assistant general manager job.
On a recent episode of the "Marlins Hot Stove Show" podcast, Kapler explained to hosts Kyle Sielaff and Stephen Strom how he wound up in Miami even though he was planning on taking a year off from working in MLB after he was fired by the Giants toward the end of the 2023 MLB season.
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“Full disclosure, I had no plans of working in baseball this year.” Kapler said. “The Giants -- just going to be very honest -- are paying me and my plan was just to travel, eat, write about it, find myself in really cool locations. I even had visions of driving this adventure van that I built from Calgary, Canada down to the tip of South America.”
Kapler then went on to describe how his meeting with Marlins president Peter Bendix, a friend since his days playing with the Tampa Bay Rays, went so well that he decided to nix his adventure van plans.
“So, that was where my mind was and Peter called and asked if I wanted to have a conversation.” Kapler told Sielaff and Strom. “And I figured it would do no harm to come to Miami and sit down with him. So, we ended up sitting down and we ended up hitting it off -- I felt like we had an aligned vision -- I thought his was extremely open-minded and wanting to do things a little differently here.
“And a lot of the things that he was saying meant a lot to me, about where he saw this organization going and developing and being as competitive as possible for a very long period of time. So that vision and that mission was compelling enough for me to want to take this leap and go all-in.”
San Francisco Giants
Kapler was fired by San Francisco with three games remaining in the 2023 season after San Francisco was eliminated from playoff contention, marking the third time in Kapler’s four-year tenure that the Giants did not make the playoffs.
While Kapler did lead the Giants to a franchise-record 107-win 2021 season, they were unable to beat the Los Angeles Dodgers in the NLDS.
As the Giants struggled towards the end of the 2023 season, the organization decided to move on from Kapler before eventually signing former San Diego Padres and Oakland Athletics manager Bob Melvin to lead the team.