Kap revived in big leagues
Phillies skipper stumbled early, then triumphed.
PHILADELPHIA — Gabe Kapler had already thrown away his first chance at college baseball when he grabbed the roof of his junior-college dugout and started doing pullups. Kapler, who morphed that season into a walking, talking fitness video, lowered himself against the dugout bench for a set of dips and then dropped to the ground and started counting push-ups.
Kapler was at Moorpark College, a junior college about 40 miles northwest of Los Angeles, in 1995 because he had gotten kicked out of Cal State Fullerton before the end of his first semester. He had no interest in attending class, which caused Fullerton’s legendary baseball coach to no longer have interest in him. Augie Garrido yanked Kapler’s scholarship and poured doubt on the baseball dreams he had held ever since he wore a satin Phillies jacket around his Southern California neighborhood.
The embarrassment at Fullerton — Kapler had to call home and explain to his working-class parents how he had squandered a near full-ride to college — set the rest of Kapler’s life in motion. His adolescence, Kapler said, ended in Garrido’s office when the Fullerton coach told Kapler that he wasn’t quite ready for college.
Kapler packed up his dorm room and drove home, spending the next eight months taking community-college courses and delivering pizzas. He altered his outlook — finding the structure and discipline to launch a journey that returned him home to L.A. on Monday when he headed to Dodger Stadium as Phillies manager. And the first step of that journey came when he went to Moorpark seeking a chance.
“My M.O. was that nobody is going to outwork me. Nobody is going to out-prepare me. Nobody is going to outhustle me,” Kapler said. “You might be more talented. You might have a prettier swing. You might be more skilled. But I’m going to outwork you. I’m going to outhustle you.”
He reprioritized his life and dedicated himself to baseball, setting his sights on being selected in the MLB draft. Kapler was determined to not repeat what had happened at Fullerton. No more drives home in the middle of the night to visit his girlfriend. No weeks of classes simply ignored. No one would work harder than Kapler, even if it meant using the time between innings to turn the dugout into his personal fitness center.
“That was just Kap,” said Pat Queenen, who played with Kapler on that 1995 Moorpark team. “Whether if he was in the gym or on the field, he was always working out. That dude was a friggin’ health freak. We joke about it, some of the guys that I still talk to, as most of us in college are doing our own thing, farting around, chasing girls and parties, he was dedicated. He was a worker.”
At Moorpark, Kapler made the team as the third baseman. This was not the Kapler who had blown his chance at Fullerton. He grew up.
Kapler was just 17 when he graduated high school and weighed only 175 pounds. He needed to add bulk to his 6-foot-1 frame. The Kapler you see in the Phillies dugout — chiseled, with a physique that rivals that of his own players — wasn’t the one who got booted from Fullerton.
He had noticed in high school that he could make good contact but that he didn’t have enough power to drive the ball past the outfielders. He ran hill sprints. He did pull-ups in the dugout. He did almost anything he could.
“I had a good enough arm to get the ball across the diamond and had good handeye coordination, but I wasn’t as physical as I could have been,” Kapler said. “I didn’t have like the armor that I needed, especially since I wasn’t perfectly athletically talented. I needed some of that. The only way I knew how to do it was to put in more work. And I did.”
He looked like a bodybuilder with his arms bursting from his tank top, as if the muscles themselves had ripped off the shirt sleeves. His new teammates wondered who the sleeveless guy was and then saw him hit and said Kapler could wear whatever he wanted. But there was so much more to “Kap” then his physique, said Ryan Briggs, who played shortstop at Moorpark.
“Gabe’s a tough cat. Philly has a tough guy there. Philly’s a tough town, and you have to be tough to work there. This is a California kid who is about the toughest guy I know.”
Kapler added 15 pounds at Moorpark and led the team in home runs and RBIs in 1995. He matched his weightlifting with a structured diet. The team used to stop on its way home from away games for burgers at McDonald’s or tritip sandwiches at a place called Woody’s Bodacious Barbecue. Kapler ordered grilled chicken sandwiches without the buns. His teammates held Sunday meetings at a pizza parlor where two players worked. Kapler ate just the cheese from his pizza.
After his playing career, Kapler launched a blog (“The Kap Lifestyle”) to discuss fitness, diet and healthy living. That lifestyle seemed to be born at Moorpark.
“We’d go on road trips with our per diems or whatever and we’re all grabbing McDonald’s or finding someone who was 21 and who could buy us beers, and Gabe was constantly the guy in the gym and just a consummate health freak. We always thought it was kind of weird. But that was him,” Queenen said. “I’d be like ‘Hey, we’re going to go to this party’ and he’d say ‘Nah, I’m going to the gym.’ Never once did I catch him out with us.”
Kapler batted .337 in his one season at Moorpark and achieved his goal that June when the Detroit Tigers drafted him in the 57th round — a round that no longer exists — of the 1995 MLB draft. It was just 19 months earlier that he was driving home from Fullerton and walking into the cleverly named pizza joint Earth, Wind & Flour to see if the place needed a new delivery driver.
It was the way Kapler responded to failure that made everything — from his time at Moorpark to his 12 years in the major leagues to his stint as one of MLB’s 30 managers — possible. He flew to Florida for the Tigers’ instructional league, almost like a glorified tryout for the draft’s anonymous 1,488th pick who was announced as “Gabriel Kapler.” It was as if Kapler was back at Moorpark, just looking for a chance. And just as at Moorpark, Kapler made the most of this one.