Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Kapler lining up reasons for fun, memorable summer
PHILADELPHIA » The most obsessed-over season in Phillies history began with a three-game winning streak. It also began with three different, moving-piece lineups … three of plenty more to come.
Even for multiple generations not alive to have given it witness, that season, 1964, still captivates. It captivates the way all meaningful moments in history captivate. It captivates because it carried a suggestion, a warning and, as the 2018 Phillies season begins, a certain source of hope.
Those past the age of reason in 1964 still talk about the thrills, about the home runs soaring out onto steaming, summertime streets, of the joy of a pennant race, of the boos and the cheers and (spoiler alert) that 10-game September losing streak that left scars that not even Jason Kelce in a mummers cap may be able to wipe away. Those are the particulars. But the basis of that story was that the 1964 Phillies were a relatively young team with lowto-modest expectations being smooshed into a pennant race by a 38-year-old who refused to manage the way so many thought he was supposed to manage.
Not including pitchers, the 1964 Phillies used 74 different batting orders. They used six different leadoff hitters. Johnny Callison, their MVP candidate and leading home run hitter, usually batted third, but occasionally batted cleanup, and 42 times, hit second. Richie Allen, the Rookie of the Year, hit second, third or fourth, depending on Gene Mauch’s analysis of that day’s pitching situation. Mauch used eight different first basemen. He used relief pitchers in various roles.
It’s not easy to keep an ordinary team so competitive for so many games that not winning a championship in the end can cause such region-wide trauma. But that’s the problem baseball has had in the 21st-century, the one Gabe Kapler clearly is determined to correct. For the last 20 years, managing baseball has been ordered to become easy, with moves so predictable that any manager straying from one will be made to stand talk-show trial for hours. What do you mean using the seventh-inning-man in the sixth? Why would you ever bat the cleanup hitter third? What kind of dope would use a closer for more than nine pitches? Hey, what’s the big idea asking that high-priced player to man a different position? Don’t you know that will damage his confidence?
Much of that is over-dramatized. Indeed, Pete Mackanin last season was willing, too, to mix up his batting orders. But his team was in the process of losing 96 times, and by then, he was just grabbing at any life preserver. As for Kapler, he warned that he was about to disobey the modern requirements of managing, saying he will use players when he wants to use players, where he wants to use players. And so, he has.
Not that anything that happens in a Grapefruit League game will jar the Cooperstown police department into alert mode, but Kapler’s early lineup-writing habits suggest a determination to make the Phillies competitive on a nightly basis, and at any cost to his players’ or his own ego. That was Rhys Hoskins leading off the other day against the Yankees, and it was Cesar Hernandez playing short, and it was a lineup that included both Aaron Altherr and Nick Williams, who are said to be in competition for one outfield spot. Already, Kapler has batted Cameron Rupp third, Hernandez fifth and Carlos Santana at the top of the order. And who was that hitting fourth the other day? That would be that Odubel Herrera.
If Kapler hadn’t been so transparent about his preference for a lineup-du-jour, such a jumble would have been lost in the relative insignificance of anything happening in Florida. But because he was so open about his plan, it was telling that he could not escape February without putting it into place.
Though Kapler is a deep believer in baseball analytics, second-level thinking is necessary for that to work. An ever-growing tornado of statistics can help a manager. Unlike other sports, sabermetrics work in baseball. If they tell Gabe Kapler that against that left-hander in that ballpark with those wind conditions on that end of a road trip that Tommy Joseph should be his first baseman and hit second, then that’s worth deep consideration. But Kapler, 42, promises to throw his own feel for people and situations into that information hurricane, too. If so, he can manage to make a young Phillies team competitive.
It happened before, with a different young manager, and it was said to be glorious. The Year of the Blue Snow, it was called, a rare and breathtaking event. And even if Gene Mauch’s analytics and gut cruelly told him to start Jim Bunning on short rest down the stretch, those very impulses had already given the Phillies and their fans an unexpectedly fun season to long, long, long remember.
Contact Jack McCaffery at jmccaffery@21st-centurymedia. com; follow him on Twitter @JackMcCaffery