When Don Mattingly and the Los Angeles Dodgers mutually agreed to part ways after the 2016 season, the club set out on a thorough search for their next manager. While several candidates were interviewed, most believed Gabe Kapler was the frontrunner to take over.
Although it would represent the first managerial job of his career, Kapler had prior ties to Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman during their time together with the Tampa Bay Rays. The Dodgers ultimately boiled their search down to Kapler and Dave Roberts.
The position of course went to Roberts, while Kapler was hired on as director of player development. His opportunity to manage came two years later, when the Philadelphia Phillies hired Kapler.
After a rough rookie season as skipper, Kapler is now leading a team that features Bryce Harper and remade itself over the winter in effort to immediately contend for a World Series. They went into a weekend series with the Dodgers who were just removed from being accused by the New York Mets of stealing signs and potentially using illegal equipment to do so.
Despite the minor controversy, Kapler made it clear his club was concerned with such a possibility, as they take measures to guard against signs being stolen by any club, via Tim Brown of Yahoo! Sports:
“I read the piece,” he said. “Our game is not to get paranoid. We don’t get paranoid. We won’t get paranoid. Our job is to always prepare for any possible situation, to make it difficult for anybody to gain any sort of advantage on us. But our clubhouse believes there are very good baseball players on the other side of the field and that’s our main focus. Getting out very good hitters and driving the ball off of very good pitchers. It doesn’t make any sense from my perspective to take our focus off of that even for a moment. I don’t think it makes sense for us to be thinking about that.”
“Let’s put it like this,” Kapler said. “There’ve been rumors about a lot of other clubs as well. We take precaution by preparing our players to mix up signals. We take precaution in every possible way. We account for as much as we can. We’re not going to do anything different for this series than we have for other series. Because, first of all, I don’t think it makes sense to put our focus there. I think it makes sense to put our focus on playing great baseball.”
The Milwaukee Brewers and Boston Red Sox lobbed similar accusations against the Dodgers during the postseason last year. There also were questions raised by the Dodgers and Colorado Rockies of possible gamesmanship in their Game 163 that decided the National League West.
Ultimately, stealing signs, so long as it’s done without technological aid, is largely considered part of the sport. MLB moved to ban outfield cameras this season in effort to curtail the possibility of video being used, but otherwise have not made strides to eliminate sign stealing.
