Not spittin’ images of oldschool managers
I hope Bob Melvin and Gabe Kapler don’t take this the wrong way, but they are ruining the game of baseball.
They are not bad individuals. On the contrary, both Bay Area baseball managers are gentlemen who comport themselves in a professional manner, respectful and helpful to those with whom they interact, including the media and their players. Zzzzzz.
They won’t even spit tobacco on your shoes.
In the spring of ’78, a rookie baseball writer (me) approached Cubs manager Herman Franks at the batting cage in Arizona. Franks wore the look of a man who just discovered that someone slipped a dead squirrel into his chewin’ tobacco pouch. Hey, looks can be deceiving. Not with Franks.
As I asked him a couple of questions, Franks, only vaguely acknowledging my presence, spit tobacco onto the ground not far from my sneakers. Was he aiming for my shoes? I didn’t ask. He was terse and dismissive. And as I would discover, not an outlier.
Baseball skippers back then modeled themselves after real skippers like Capt. Ahab, and often treated sportswriters like landlubbers.
In the early ’80s, the Bay Area had a couple of beauts in Billy Martin and Frank Robinson. Both were former East Bay kids with chips on their shoulders.
With those two, and most managers, you didn’t have to ask a dumb question to incur their wrath. You just had to show up. We were the natural enemy.
Robinson had Lakers’ season tickets. At one game, he saw me courtside talking to his daughter and asked an usher who I was. Told I was a writer, F. Robby sneered, “I don’t like him.”
These days? The game has changed. Not just the sport, but the game of manager versus media.
Kapler and Melvin are glad to see you. The media has dealt with Kapler mostly in Zoom format, on which he is unfailingly pleasant and helpful. Calls people by their names, and not the kind of generic obscene names the oldtime managers favored.
Melvin can come off as businesslike and professorial, but he’s a pleasant fellow who shoots the breeze with reporters and has a nice sense of humor. He will tell a story now and then, in grand old baseball tradition.
Both Melvin and Kapler answer questions — the easy ones and the hard ones, and yes, sometimes even the lessthanbrilliant ones. They actually try to be helpful.
From what I’ve seen, it’s very difficult to make Kapler mad. Equanimity, there’s a word you would seldom apply to the oldschool skippers, but Kapler, oh yeah, that’s him. You don’t even notice a wince or eye roll.
With Melvin, occasionally you get a bristle, where you know his teeth are grinding, but you don’t get the sense that the event will end with someone getting tased.
These are two men not fixated on proving their toughness. A year ago, I asked local coaches/managers a set of questions about life in quarantine, and requested selfies. Kapler gave the deepest answers and sent a photo of himself playing his bass guitar. Melvin said his best newly acquired skill was his housekeeping, and sent a photo of a toughguy manager doing dishes.
Robinson and Martin might have invited me to defecate in my hat.
What has changed?
The stage, for one thing. Postgame news conferences used to be held in the manager’s office, his domain. When things got tense, you felt like you were standing between the manager and that plate of food and can of beer on his desk.
Today, postgame media avails (when not in Zoom mode) are held in an interview room, with the manager on a podium, in front of his teamlogo backdrop. Much more formal and corporate.
The news conferences are televised, and even managers like Martin and Robinson might have been reluctant to snarl and scream at reporters had they been on live TV.
And, managers aren’t managers anymore. Today’s skipper is more like the first mate. He is merely one part of a corporate leadership group headed by the general manager and his analytics crew. If you question the manager’s strategy, you know and he knows that it wasn’t strictly his strategy.
Baseball seems to be trending counter to society, becoming less angry and confrontational, more civil and civilized.
That’s good, right? But Melvin and Kapler, if you two ever feel the need to vent, even if only as homage to the old days, I’m here for you.