Do the Miami Marlins have Google?

Back in October, we learned that highly respected baseball mind and glass ceiling-smasher Kim Ng stepped down from her GM role because the Marlins, who Ng had improved from a record of 57-105 to 84-78 and an NL Wild Card berth, insisted on hiring a president of baseball operations to be Ng’s boss. Sure, many MLB organizations are structured to have both a president of baseball ops and a GM, but to suddenly shift to such a hierarchy after the first female GM in MLB history takes your woeful team to the playoffs felt stupid at best, and really, really sexist at worst.

Now, the Marlins have done themselves one better, hiring former Giants’ manager Gabe Kapler as an “assistant GM.” This made me snort with laughter, as the Marlins do not currently possess a GM, what with them f-cking around and finding out with the previously mentioned Kim Ng. Kapler did a decent job in San Francisco, finishing his time there with a record of 295-248, but a lot of those wins came in the Giants’ 107-win 2021 team, the only Giants team under Kapler’s tenure to finish with a winning record or make the postseason.

But here’s exactly why the Marlins are so fired up to bring in Kapler, per Ken Rosenthal.

“Success” is certainly a word choice for Kapler’s time with the Dodgers, which is probably best remembered not for what he accomplished on the field. From 2014 until he was hired as manager by the Phillies in 2017, Kapler was working as Dodgers’ director of player development. In 2015, he received an email from the grandmother of a 17-year old girl, who claimed she was beaten up by two women while drinking with Dodgers’ minor leaguers at a hotel. Kapler responded to this revelation by trying to set up a dinner with the young girl, her grandmother and the two players who didn’t intervene, including one who recorded the incident. Kapler wrote to the grandmother that the dinner would “teach valuable lessons to all involved through this method of follow up,” including, presumably, the two adult players who were drinking with an underage girl. According to the Washington Post, Kapler did not report the incident to the Dodgers or the police.

Later, the girl claimed to have been sexually assaulted by one of the players, which Kapler denies knowing about at the time he suggested the dinner. As the always excellent Jon Wertheim wrote for SI, “The case of the runaway is illustrative of just how easily allegations of sexual assault can vanish. When contacted by police, the Dodgers hired an attorney for the player, as they are required by California employment law. Yet, after no criminal charges were forthcoming, the team did not request the police report, and, multiple sources tell SI, the incident was seldom discussed again.” Though a case worker for the girl, who was a runaway, reportedly wanted a Dodgers minor-leaguer prosecuted for sexual assault, the girl refused to cooperate, and the issue just went away. As they so often do.

After the initial story broke, Sports Illustrated reported that Kapler and his staff were aware of two other incidents at the same hotel, one was the allegation that a player had sexually assaulted a member of the hotel’s housekeeping staff, the other that a group of Dodgers’ minor leaguers were “caught on surveillance video confronting female guests— stalking … and behaving strangely.’” According to SI, Dodgers Manager of International Scouting Roman Barinas later wrote in a text thread regarding the allegations of sexual violence against the housekeeper, “[The player] crossed a line and is extremely lucky he isn’t in jail.”

If Kapler reported either of those incidents to the Dodgers, the team never reported them to MLB. All three stories only came out because former Kapler assistant Nick Francona, who was fired by Kapler, decided to talk to the media.

And lest you think that knowledge of Kapler’s role in handling the aforementioned incidents is niche knowledge, only remembered by those who care enough to dig around the internet to find evidence of misdeeds, Kapler’s introductory press conference as manager of the Giants in 2019 was heavily peppered with questions about his tenure with the Dodgers. Kapler told the media that day, ““I think if I could go back and do some of the Dodgers stuff different, I probably would have called my mom and asked her a few more questions about which steps to take. And, to (Giants’ GM Farhan Zaidi’s) point, figuring out ways to support even better. I think this is the right time to say that I’m sorry that I didn’t make all the right moves.”

The thing is, calling his mom was not what Kapler was supposed to do and it’s not what MLB requires him to do. What he was supposed to do was tell his bosses at the Dodgers, who were supposed to report it to MLB (though the league policy requiring the Dodgers to inform MLB wasn’t put into place until six months after the allegations made by the 17-year old, the policy was in place for the last two incidents).

There are people who have the training and experience to handle the victims and the allegations made against players under Kapler’s watch, and they do not work for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Even giving Kapler the benefit of the doubt and taking his word that he didn’t know about the sexual assault claims, in what world is a former baseball player qualified to sit down with a minor and two adult men, and mediate the fact that they didn’t intervene in her physical abuse, after plying her with alcohol in their hotel room? The people who do that kind of thing work in mediation and restorative justice, go through a significant amount of training and, in many communities, are required to be certified. Kapler’s hubris in thinking he had the skills to moderate a discussion over dinner are still mind-blowing.

So either the Marlins know about all this and it just didn’t register that multiple allegations of players harming women under Kapler’s watch is something people might, you know, care about, or they didn’t do enough research and are just saying whatever sounds like the right thing to say about their new guy. Either way, it’s yet another terrible look for Miami.