SF Giants: Does Anybody still Trust Manager Gabe Kapler?

San Francisco Giants manager Gabe Kapler has trusted Trevor Gott with ninth inning pitching duties in three of the last four games and the results have been disastrous. Kapler affirmed that he trusts Gott, but in so doing, not many people are left trusting Kapler.

As the old saying goes: fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me thrice, shame on Farhan Zaidi and the Giants.

The San Francisco Giants have been fooled the last three times they had a ninth inning lead into thinking Trevor Gott could close out the game.

While Gott undoubtedly deserves a good measure of blame for these three straight calamities, many Giants fans will undoubtedly turn their vitriol towards the man who put him in a position to fail: manager Gabe Kapler.

The Giants Roster has its Flaws

Let’s be fair to Kapler first, he is managing a very very poor roster that has very little promising young talent currently on it.

The bullpen is a hodgepodge of starter and relievers with really only one proven arm that can be relied on to get outs in the form of Tony Watson.

Even Bruce Bochy would have struggled to figure out how to use the current Giants bullpen effectively, and we saw firsthand how brilliant of a bullpen manager he was for over a decade.

That being said, Kapler has mismanaged the bullpen. Perhaps it would be more apt to say that the Giants organization is mismanaging the bullpen. It is really no secret that a prevailing view among followers of the team is that Kapler is merely a patsy for Farhan Zaidi in the dugout.

Even if Farhan is really pulling the strings, Kapler will be a human piñata for Giants fans for a few years as they struggle mightily. But if things start to turn around for the Giants and they become contenders sometime during Kapler’s tenure, there is still likely to be a lack of trust from the fanbase unless more decisions start to pan out.

While it is frustrating and not at all fun to watch, all we can hope for as fans is that Kapler and Zaidi learn from their mistakes.

Because while the fans may not trust Kapler, and even if some of the players are starting to doubt him (which I will qualify by saying I obviously have no clue what is going on in the clubhouse but it is only human to doubt a manager after three blown games), there is still one man who trusts him, Farhan Zaidi, and he is the only one that matters.

So buckle up, fans. Let’s all get ready to ride the Zaidi-Kapler train for at the very least the next few seasons. It is bound to be bumpy, and it just may go off the tracks, but the hope is it will lead to something better.