McCaffery: Kapler once showed real baseball fight, but now it’s gone missing

PHILADELPHIA » The Boston Red Sox were still under all of those curses in July of 2004 when Alex Rodriguez was hit by a pitch, a fight occurred, a Yankee was left bloodied, and Red Sox outfielder Gabe Kapler had to be shoved off the field. By October, they were world champions.

“That one was epic,” Kapler was saying Wednesday. “And in some ways, it was really good for the 2004 Red Sox.”

It would go down as the year of Curt Schilling’s bloody sock, the one the former Phillie wore when an odd procedure to correct an ankle-tendon issue resulted in a postseason geyser of plasma. But the blood streaming from the ear of Yankees starter Tanyon Sturtze in July may have been just as important. Kapler was tight with details, but a YouTube video of the famous fight exists.

Rodriguez and Sox catcher Jason Varitek were in the main event. But later in the film, Sturtze is seen bleeding, Kapler, who wasn’t even in the game, is being pushed out of the rumble by teammates, and the announcers are revealing that the two had been fighting, off to the side, during one of those typical baseball-brawl pile-ups.

That’s the video they should be showing in Citizens Bank Park whenever Kapler is introduced.

Do that, and there wouldn’t be 35,000 empty seats for pennant-race games.

“We really came together after that,” Kapler recalled, before a game against the Washington Nationals.

The Red Sox won that game, 11-10, scoring three times in the bottom of the ninth, a foreshadowing of the refuse-to-quit spirit that allowed them to rally from an 0-3 deficit to stun New York in the ALCS. Kapler is 43, not 33. So he’s not going to be involved in any more on-field brawls. Besides, he was with the Sox in 2003, too, and saw what happened to Don Zimmer when he thought it was a good idea to fight Pedro Martinez. But the Phillies could use a little of whatever it was that made the 2004 Sox champions.

And that means more than just better starting pitching.

“It’s interesting,” Kapler said. “There was recently talk about getting thrown out of games. I wonder how much impact that actually has on a team. I wonder if that’s a good thing. I know Aaron Boone was thrown out of a game and had like a big thing that happened at the plate. What happened from there with their club? Does anybody know?”

Boone, the current Yankees manager, was tossed Sept. 1, pinched for quarreling about balls and strikes. The Yankees won that game, 2-1, over visiting Detroit, would win just four of their next nine and will not win the A.L. East. Kapler knew that when he asked the question, because if nothing else, he always has the baseball data to support what he’s thinking. And he’s thinking that managers being run is not always the solution to breaking or preventing slumps.

The topics of on-field scenes, ejections and fights has been growing as the Phillies have retreated in the N.L. East. So when Kapler argued an overturned ball-strike call to Bryce Harper a night earlier, he knew he could have been thumbed and was ready for the honor.

“I want to be careful here because of the right way to go about protecting the conversations between umpires and managers,” Kapler shared. “I wasn’t happy because, first, because the call went the other way. I would’ve much preferred there to be a strike on the batter.

“I was disappointed. But I’m probably best not to dive too deep here. I want to, believe me. I would love to share this with you.

“They didn’t throw me out, and I thought maybe they were probably justified in throwing me out at that point. But I thought they let me say my piece, and at that point, it would’ve been really contrived to go further.”

Maybe the umps didn’t throw him out because they already knew that had one more person been heaved from the ballpark, there virtually would have been no one left to heckle them at all. That’s another issue, but it may be connected. The fans don’t see their manager fight. So when the Phillies lose series after series, they wonder why it’s been 14 years since that poor pitcher from the Yankees had the left side of his face ripped open and why Kapler no longer is so combative. Indeed, he projects an eerie tolerance of failure.

A day earlier, when they were dropping both sides of an important doubleheader, the Phils struck out 21 times and left 17 runners on base. But pressed about his hitting coaches, John Mallee and Pedro Guerrero, Kapler did everything but suggest the verbiage for their Hall of Fame plaques.

“Oh my gosh, those two are an incredible tandem,” he said. “They have done a tremendous job. I understand why a correlation with recent struggles would bring up questions about all sorts of things, but in this particular case I think you’re talking about one of the better hitting coaches in John Mallee and a guy who has supported him in Pedro Guerrero that is off-the-charts good.”

Imagine, just imagine, how off-those-charts incredible they Phillies would be if they weren’t second in the National League in striking out, 11th in runs, seventh in leaving runners on base and fourth from the bottom in batting average.

Ah, maybe Kapler is onto something. Those 2004 Red Sox? They did lead the American League in striking out. Then again, at one point, with one of their outfielders in there swinging, they did show some fight.