The San Francisco Giants named Gabe Kapler as their new manager Tuesday, and it didn’t take long for the backlash to begin.
Back in 2015, Kapler reportedly did not alert authorities after a 17-year-old girl contacted him about being assaulted by one of the Dodgers’ minor leaguers while he served as Los Angeles’ farm director. Kapler initially denied ever having an allegation brought forward to him, and the Giants since have been criticized for hiring the 45-year-old.
But Kapler responded to the criticism Wednesday with an apology.
“I think this is the right time to say that I’m sorry that I didn’t make all the right moves,” Kapler said at his introductory press conference, via the Associated Press. “Everything that I did I acted on from a place of goodness and from my heart and wanting to do the right thing, but I was naive. I was in over my skis and trying to do things on my own when it was very clear that I needed counsel.”
Now, he’s finally taking responsibility for his actions.
“I don’t think that I did enough, and we’ve talked about some of the ways that I could have been better in those situations,” Kapler said. “I have a lot of remorse for that. I wish I would have been more informed, I wish I would have gotten more informed, and I take responsibility for not taking those steps. … My responsibility in the issue was my responsibility in the issue, and that was to ask more questions, it was to get more counsel. It was to not naively think that I was in a position where I could help in the specific ways that came up.”
Giants president of baseball operations Fahran Zaidi, who was the Dodgers general manager in 2015, acknowledged his own shortcomings from the incident, and promised to learn from the experience.
“We need to do better in this area,” Zaidi said. “… As I think back to not just the past year but my 15 years in baseball, I realize I haven’t done enough. I haven’t done enough on the side of preventing those things from happening at all rather than what the right thing is and what the right protocol is for how to handle them. And that’s something that I pledge, and we as an organization pledge: to be much more proactive and aggressive about going forward.
He continued: “We know that we’re going to be on notice. We want to be on notice because this is something we want to be better at and, I think, we as an industry and a sport have to be better at.”
(You can watch the full press conference here.)
