A 12-year Major League Baseball veteran who appeared in 1,104 career games and was a member of the 2004 Boston Red Sox World Series championship team, Gabe Kapler is a strength training and powerful food enthusiast who took a public stance against performance-enhancing drugs as a player.
Kapler has perpetually emphasized the importance of training outdoors and clean eating. To that end, he took to sharing information in 2013 and started a health and well-being blog at Kaplifestyle.com.
In the space, Kapler shares applicable advice on the procurement and cooking of whole foods, compares various workout philosophies and trends and interactively responds to questions from readers. Despite a full schedule that holds both family and work commitments, Kapler posts as often as possible, in addition to opening the space to readers, athletes and members of the media for guest blogs. He currently serves as Director, Player Development for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Prior, he was a baseball analyst for Fox Sports, combining an extensive playing background with an affinity for advanced baseball metrics, providing viewers with in-depth commentary and insight delivered in an understandable fashion. Kapler covered the 2014 All-Star Game and World Series before transitioning back to MLB with the Dodgers. From 2011-2013, he tackled special scouting assignments for the Tampa Bay Rays in addition to working with a team to build a startup company. After initially being selected by the Detroit Tigers in the 57th round of the 1995 MLB amateur draft, Kapler outperformed his longshot status, enjoying a meteoric rise in the club’s minor league system over his first three professional seasons. In 1998, he earned Minor League Player of the Year honors from USA Today, Baseball Weekly and the Sporting News after he set Southern League (AAA) single-season records for RBI (146), total bases (319), extra-base hits (87) and doubles (47). He also led the league in hits, home runs and runs scored that season, leading to his being named the Detroit organization’s No. 1 prospect by Baseball America. After breaking in with the Tigers toward the end of the 1998 season, Kapler went on to collect 799 hits and post a lifetime batting average of .268 over his 12 seasons with six different clubs. The crowning achievement of his career however, came when he was one of nine players on the field for the Red Sox recording of the final out in the 2004 World Series, a victory that snapped an 86-year championship drought for the franchise. Kapler is an angel investor in Coach Up, a service that connects athletes with private coaches. He also owns several real estate properties in Inglewood, CA.
Kapler has two sons, Chase (17) and Dane (15) and resides in Malibu, CA. In his free time, he enjoys cooking, lifestyle training and has a passion for music, naming Miles Davis, John Lee Hooker and Ali Farka Toure among his favorite artists.
You can follow Gabe on Twitter @GabeKapler and Instagram @GabeKapler
Striving to take bold action, knowing that you’ll inevitably fail and look foolish, is a strong strategy.
Recently, an inspiring colleague of mine shared this with me.
Life is a maze and we are mice. We have decisions to make at every fork in the road. We will unquestionably take wrong turns, bump up against walls and need to change course. Humans, just like mice, need freedom to move about. If we’re told, “Don’t choose the wrong path,” either explicitly or subliminally, we freeze and stop navigating the maze. The fear of failing leaves us paralyzed and unable to move forward. We stagnate. From the New York Times:
The most concrete thing that neuroscience tells us is that when the fear system of the brain is active, exploratory activity and risk-taking are turned off.
I’m not suggesting that we should become adrenaline junkies, perpetually looking for riskier activities. We should continually evaluate upside and minimize downside. However, it is only by taking calculated chances that we can make any progress. If you never fail, then you have never attempted to achieve what you’re capable of.
Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. -Albert Einstein
By new, he means difficult and challenging.
Learning to accept the possibility of making a mistake or even fail is a challenge to our comfort zones. We are hardwired to evaluate the negatives more strongly than the positives. As you know, we riff around here on the topic of trial and error. That presumes that there will be errors – but our resulting lessons will be stronger for having made them. Robust triumphs are even more satisfying.
Take a baseball player who experiments with a new approach at the plate. Maybe it’s attacking a fastball in 0-0 count when his personal default setting is to take the first pitch. The first ten times he swings, he comes up completely empty, making weak contact, beating the ball into the ground and awkwardly swinging and missing. He stays with his plan. He’s done his research and taken a long view. He trusts that, over the course of time, his tree will bear fruit. From the BBC:
There has to be some reason to believe the science or technology underpinning that solution, that makes us think the idea is only mostly crazy.
Finally it starts to click. Line drives begin to sprinkle and he reaches base more frequently. He’s on drugs. It’s a high.
Without the risk, without the experiment, we have zero chance to become substantially stronger. Now, I’m not suggesting we only learn from making a wrong turn. Making the correct one teaches us just as much, if not more. From Forbes:
Just as the failures of others teach us more than their successes, our own successes teach us more than our failures. Neurological research bears this out. Scientists at MIT monitored primates’ brains while teaching them a specific task. When a primate succeeded, the researchers observed the monkey’s neurons respond – their brain physically changed in response to learning. When a primate failed at the task, however, there was virtually no change. Furthermore, once primates experienced success, they were more likely to continue improving their performance.
Additionally, it just feels better to succeed (read: win). But only being willing to entertain success means that we will fail as a group. From lifehack.org:
Too many organizations today have cultures of perfection: a set of organizational beliefs that any failure is unacceptable. Only pure, untainted success will do. To retain your reputation as an achiever, you must reach every goal and never, ever make a mistake that you can’t hide or blame on someone else.
Imagine the stress and terror in an organization like that. The constant covering up of the smallest blemishes. The wild finger-pointing as everyone tries to shift the blame for the inevitable cock-ups and messes onto someone else. The rapid turnover as people rise high, then fall abruptly from grace. The lying, cheating, falsification of data, and hiding of problems—until they become crises that defy being hidden any longer.
If we care to grow as people and as teams, we must continually push our personal and collective limitations. We won’t always be successful, but our ultimate achievements will be grander for it.
If you’re an athlete, there’s real value in learning how to “grind it out.” However, we should optimize to be at least as equally efficient and measured as we are gritty.
I vividly remember a muggy 2002 spring training day in Port Charlotte, Florida. I had come to the realization on that Mid-March morning that my pop (power) was missing in action. The ball wasn’t jumping off my bat like it usually did. As I weakly impacted ball after ball, grunting helplessly and sweating through my 2nd Rangers dry-fit, I told myself I was going to hit until I “got it.” I was prepared to “grind” until balls began to whistle off the back of the cage or over the double wood wall at Charlotte County Stadium and into the alligator pond beyond left center field. I likely took 200 swings that morning, then played a shitty game, then dragged our hitting coach out on the field in the late afternoon as the sun went down, “working.” I was a gritty SOB.
Grit has been a popular word in baseball circles, management seminars, business classes and in life for several years now. It makes some level of sense. We value those with resourcefulness, the ability to not be shaken by obstacles while pursuing goals. This level of sheer persistence in spite of the odds appeals to our sense of justice – anyone can make it if they only work hard enough. It also reinforces an unhealthy narrative; more is better.
Malcolm Gladwell weaved us a compelling tale. He shared that 10,000 hours of practice is needed to become an expert in our field. Like grit, this makes complicated tasks seem less daunting because we’re working towards a fixed goal. Pick up a bass for the first time ever and try to play like Bootsy Collins. You’re not going to get very far. Yet the idea that if we just practice enough, every day, we’ll master anything we put our minds to puts us in the driver’s seat and gives us a reason to try.
Ultimately, we know this is only partially true. Talent and innate characteristics matter. Authors of a recent study on the concept were “quite clear that some people do reach an elite level of performance without copious practice, while other people fail to do so despite copious practice.” I will never be an elite horse jockey regardless of how many hours I practice it. Their research supports this conclusion:
More than 20 years ago, researchers proposed that individual differences in performance in such domains as music, sports, and games largely reflect individual differences in amount of deliberate practice, which was defined as engagement in structured activities created specifically to improve performance in a domain. This view is a frequent topic of popular-science writing—but is it supported by empirical evidence? To answer this question, we conducted a meta-analysis covering all major domains in which deliberate practice has been investigated. We found that deliberate practice explained 26% of the variance in performance for games, 21% for music, 18% for sports, 4% for education, and less than 1% for professions. We conclude that deliberate practice is important, but not as important as has been argued.
Now, of course, 18% variation matters. Tell any elite athlete he can (legally) improve his performance by 18% and you’ll have 100 takers out of 100. But persistence is only valuable if what we’re striving towards is a sensible goal, practiced intelligently. If I’m a hitter working on a mechanical adjustment in the cage that I just can’t get right, practicing the incorrect movement only makes me better at being worse. The hours I spent taking hacks now may result in additional unsavory habits I need to figure out how to undo. Continuing to persist in strategies that have been demonstrably ineffective doesn’t represent virtuous behavior; it represents wasted time.
In the absence of alternatives, most participants worked on the unsolvable trials until the end of the time limit; however, in the presence of alternatives, participants high in optimism or self-mastery beliefs who were not allowed to return to previous trials disengaged from the unsolvable anagrams nearly 4 min sooner than participants low in such beliefs. Additionally, optimists tended to outperform participants low in optimism on the subsequent solvable trials when these trials were said to test an aspect of verbal intelligence different from the initial set. These results suggest that people high in optimism and self-mastery are able to disengage from unsolvable tasks in order to allocate effort to solvable tasks.
Surprisingly, that optimism matters. We know that confidence has a significant impact on performance, but enthusiasm does too.
’We have empirical evidence that deliberate practice, while important, …does not largely account for individual differences in performance. The question now is what else matters.’ And there are many possible answers. One is how early in life you were introduced to the activity — which, as the researchers explain, appears to have effects that go beyond how many years of practice you booked. Others include how open you are to collaborating and learning from others, and how much you enjoy the activity.
That last one — intrinsic motivation — has a huge empirical base of support in workplaces, schools, and elsewhere. We’ve long known that the pleasure one takes from an activity is a powerful predictor of success. For example, one group of researchers tried to sort out the factors that helped third and fourth graders remember what they had been reading. They found that how interested the students were in the passage was thirty times more important than how “readable” the passage was.
This motivation is important to keep in mind. One of my earliest and most trusted coaches used to always preach to me to end on a high note. I’d be frustrated and wanting “just one more,” 7 swings might become 15 which might become 50. The increasing frustration, however, often saps our intrinsic motivation to get back in the cage the next day and the next. Not letting ourselves get outworked is critical, but only when we do so with a strong level of self-awareness. Simply, we can ask ourselves “would I be better served focusing my attention elsewhere in this moment? Is repeating this action helping me or am I just trying to be a “hard worker?” Of course, being honest with ourselves is critical. Grit may not be the ultimate determiner of success, but laziness is likely to result in failure.
Striving to take bold action, knowing that you’ll inevitably fail and look foolish, is a strong strategy.
Recently, an inspiring colleague of mine shared this with me.
Life is a maze and we are mice. We have decisions to make at every fork in the road. We will unquestionably take wrong turns, bump up against walls and need to change course. Humans, just like mice, need freedom to move about. If we’re told, “Don’t choose the wrong path,” either explicitly or subliminally, we freeze and stop navigating the maze. The fear of failing leaves us paralyzed and unable to move forward. We stagnate. From the New York Times:
The most concrete thing that neuroscience tells us is that when the fear system of the brain is active, exploratory activity and risk-taking are turned off.
I’m not suggesting that we should become adrenaline junkies, perpetually looking for riskier activities. We should continually evaluate upside and minimize downside. However, it is only by taking calculated chances that we can make any progress. If you never fail, then you have never attempted to achieve what you’re capable of.
Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. -Albert Einstein
By new, he means difficult and challenging.
Learning to accept the possibility of making a mistake or even fail is a challenge to our comfort zones. We are hardwired to evaluate the negatives more strongly than the positives. As you know, we riff around here on the topic of trial and error. That presumes that there will be errors – but our resulting lessons will be stronger for having made them. Robust triumphs are even more satisfying.
Take a baseball player who experiments with a new approach at the plate. Maybe it’s attacking a fastball in 0-0 count when his personal default setting is to take the first pitch. The first ten times he swings, he comes up completely empty, making weak contact, beating the ball into the ground and awkwardly swinging and missing. He stays with his plan. He’s done his research and taken a long view. He trusts that, over the course of time, his tree will bear fruit. From the BBC:
There has to be some reason to believe the science or technology underpinning that solution, that makes us think the idea is only mostly crazy.
Finally it starts to click. Line drives begin to sprinkle and he reaches base more frequently. He’s on drugs. It’s a high.
Without the risk, without the experiment, we have zero chance to become substantially stronger. Now, I’m not suggesting we only learn from making a wrong turn. Making the correct one teaches us just as much, if not more. From Forbes:
Just as the failures of others teach us more than their successes, our own successes teach us more than our failures. Neurological research bears this out. Scientists at MIT monitored primates’ brains while teaching them a specific task. When a primate succeeded, the researchers observed the monkey’s neurons respond – their brain physically changed in response to learning. When a primate failed at the task, however, there was virtually no change. Furthermore, once primates experienced success, they were more likely to continue improving their performance.
Additionally, it just feels better to succeed (read: win). But only being willing to entertain success means that we will fail as a group. From lifehack.org:
Too many organizations today have cultures of perfection: a set of organizational beliefs that any failure is unacceptable. Only pure, untainted success will do. To retain your reputation as an achiever, you must reach every goal and never, ever make a mistake that you can’t hide or blame on someone else.
Imagine the stress and terror in an organization like that. The constant covering up of the smallest blemishes. The wild finger-pointing as everyone tries to shift the blame for the inevitable cock-ups and messes onto someone else. The rapid turnover as people rise high, then fall abruptly from grace. The lying, cheating, falsification of data, and hiding of problems—until they become crises that defy being hidden any longer.
If we care to grow as people and as teams, we must continually push our personal and collective limitations. We won’t always be successful, but our ultimate achievements will be grander for it.
Striving to take bold action, knowing that you’ll inevitably fail and look foolish, is a strong strategy.
Recently, an inspiring colleague of mine shared this with me.
Life is a maze and we are mice. We have decisions to make at every fork in the road. We will unquestionably take wrong turns, bump up against walls and need to change course. Humans, just like mice, need freedom to move about. If we’re told, “Don’t choose the wrong path,” either explicitly or subliminally, we freeze and stop navigating the maze. The fear of failing leaves us paralyzed and unable to move forward. We stagnate. From the New York Times:
The most concrete thing that neuroscience tells us is that when the fear system of the brain is active, exploratory activity and risk-taking are turned off.
I’m not suggesting that we should become adrenaline junkies, perpetually looking for riskier activities. We should continually evaluate upside and minimize downside. However, it is only by taking calculated chances that we can make any progress. If you never fail, then you have never attempted to achieve what you’re capable of.
Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. -Albert Einstein
By new, he means difficult and challenging.
Learning to accept the possibility of making a mistake or even fail is a challenge to our comfort zones. We are hardwired to evaluate the negatives more strongly than the positives. As you know, we riff around here on the topic of trial and error. That presumes that there will be errors – but our resulting lessons will be stronger for having made them. Robust triumphs are even more satisfying.
Take a baseball player who experiments with a new approach at the plate. Maybe it’s attacking a fastball in 0-0 count when his personal default setting is to take the first pitch. The first ten times he swings, he comes up completely empty, making weak contact, beating the ball into the ground and awkwardly swinging and missing. He stays with his plan. He’s done his research and taken a long view. He trusts that, over the course of time, his tree will bear fruit. From the BBC:
There has to be some reason to believe the science or technology underpinning that solution, that makes us think the idea is only mostly crazy.
Finally it starts to click. Line drives begin to sprinkle and he reaches base more frequently. He’s on drugs. It’s a high.
Without the risk, without the experiment, we have zero chance to become substantially stronger. Now, I’m not suggesting we only learn from making a wrong turn. Making the correct one teaches us just as much, if not more. From Forbes:
Just as the failures of others teach us more than their successes, our own successes teach us more than our failures. Neurological research bears this out. Scientists at MIT monitored primates’ brains while teaching them a specific task. When a primate succeeded, the researchers observed the monkey’s neurons respond – their brain physically changed in response to learning. When a primate failed at the task, however, there was virtually no change. Furthermore, once primates experienced success, they were more likely to continue improving their performance.
Additionally, it just feels better to succeed (read: win). But only being willing to entertain success means that we will fail as a group. From lifehack.org:
Too many organizations today have cultures of perfection: a set of organizational beliefs that any failure is unacceptable. Only pure, untainted success will do. To retain your reputation as an achiever, you must reach every goal and never, ever make a mistake that you can’t hide or blame on someone else.
Imagine the stress and terror in an organization like that. The constant covering up of the smallest blemishes. The wild finger-pointing as everyone tries to shift the blame for the inevitable cock-ups and messes onto someone else. The rapid turnover as people rise high, then fall abruptly from grace. The lying, cheating, falsification of data, and hiding of problems—until they become crises that defy being hidden any longer.
If we care to grow as people and as teams, we must continually push our personal and collective limitations. We won’t always be successful, but our ultimate achievements will be grander for it.
A 12-year Major League Baseball veteran who appeared in 1,104 career games and was a member of the 2004 Boston Red Sox World Series championship team, Gabe Kapler is a strength training and powerful food enthusiast who took a public stance against performance-enhancing drugs as a player.
Kapler has perpetually emphasized the importance of training outdoors and clean eating. To that end, he took to sharing information in 2013 and started a health and well-being blog at Kaplifestyle.com.
In the space, Kapler shares applicable advice on the procurement and cooking of whole foods, compares various workout philosophies and trends and interactively responds to questions from readers. Despite a full schedule that holds both family and work commitments, Kapler posts as often as possible, in addition to opening the space to readers, athletes and members of the media for guest blogs. He currently serves as Director, Player Development for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Prior, he was a baseball analyst for Fox Sports, combining an extensive playing background with an affinity for advanced baseball metrics, providing viewers with in-depth commentary and insight delivered in an understandable fashion. Kapler covered the 2014 All-Star Game and World Series before transitioning back to MLB with the Dodgers. From 2011-2013, he tackled special scouting assignments for the Tampa Bay Rays in addition to working with a team to build a startup company. After initially being selected by the Detroit Tigers in the 57th round of the 1995 MLB amateur draft, Kapler outperformed his longshot status, enjoying a meteoric rise in the club’s minor league system over his first three professional seasons. In 1998, he earned Minor League Player of the Year honors from USA Today, Baseball Weekly and the Sporting News after he set Southern League (AAA) single-season records for RBI (146), total bases (319), extra-base hits (87) and doubles (47). He also led the league in hits, home runs and runs scored that season, leading to his being named the Detroit organization’s No. 1 prospect by Baseball America. After breaking in with the Tigers toward the end of the 1998 season, Kapler went on to collect 799 hits and post a lifetime batting average of .268 over his 12 seasons with six different clubs. The crowning achievement of his career however, came when he was one of nine players on the field for the Red Sox recording of the final out in the 2004 World Series, a victory that snapped an 86-year championship drought for the franchise. Kapler is an angel investor in Coach Up, a service that connects athletes with private coaches. He also owns several real estate properties in Inglewood, CA.
Kapler has two sons, Chase (17) and Dane (15) and resides in Malibu, CA. In his free time, he enjoys cooking, lifestyle training and has a passion for music, naming Miles Davis, John Lee Hooker and Ali Farka Toure among his favorite artists.
You can follow Gabe on Twitter @GabeKapler and Instagram @GabeKapler
If you’re an athlete, there’s real value in learning how to “grind it out.” However, we should optimize to be at least as equally efficient and measured as we are gritty.
I vividly remember a muggy 2002 spring training day in Port Charlotte, Florida. I had come to the realization on that Mid-March morning that my pop (power) was missing in action. The ball wasn’t jumping off my bat like it usually did. As I weakly impacted ball after ball, grunting helplessly and sweating through my 2nd Rangers dry-fit, I told myself I was going to hit until I “got it.” I was prepared to “grind” until balls began to whistle off the back of the cage or over the double wood wall at Charlotte County Stadium and into the alligator pond beyond left center field. I likely took 200 swings that morning, then played a shitty game, then dragged our hitting coach out on the field in the late afternoon as the sun went down, “working.” I was a gritty SOB.
Grit has been a popular word in baseball circles, management seminars, business classes and in life for several years now. It makes some level of sense. We value those with resourcefulness, the ability to not be shaken by obstacles while pursuing goals. This level of sheer persistence in spite of the odds appeals to our sense of justice – anyone can make it if they only work hard enough. It also reinforces an unhealthy narrative; more is better.
Malcolm Gladwell weaved us a compelling tale. He shared that 10,000 hours of practice is needed to become an expert in our field. Like grit, this makes complicated tasks seem less daunting because we’re working towards a fixed goal. Pick up a bass for the first time ever and try to play like Bootsy Collins. You’re not going to get very far. Yet the idea that if we just practice enough, every day, we’ll master anything we put our minds to puts us in the driver’s seat and gives us a reason to try.
Ultimately, we know this is only partially true. Talent and innate characteristics matter. Authors of a recent study on the concept were “quite clear that some people do reach an elite level of performance without copious practice, while other people fail to do so despite copious practice.” I will never be an elite horse jockey regardless of how many hours I practice it. Their research supports this conclusion:
More than 20 years ago, researchers proposed that individual differences in performance in such domains as music, sports, and games largely reflect individual differences in amount of deliberate practice, which was defined as engagement in structured activities created specifically to improve performance in a domain. This view is a frequent topic of popular-science writing—but is it supported by empirical evidence? To answer this question, we conducted a meta-analysis covering all major domains in which deliberate practice has been investigated. We found that deliberate practice explained 26% of the variance in performance for games, 21% for music, 18% for sports, 4% for education, and less than 1% for professions. We conclude that deliberate practice is important, but not as important as has been argued.
Now, of course, 18% variation matters. Tell any elite athlete he can (legally) improve his performance by 18% and you’ll have 100 takers out of 100. But persistence is only valuable if what we’re striving towards is a sensible goal, practiced intelligently. If I’m a hitter working on a mechanical adjustment in the cage that I just can’t get right, practicing the incorrect movement only makes me better at being worse. The hours I spent taking hacks now may result in additional unsavory habits I need to figure out how to undo. Continuing to persist in strategies that have been demonstrably ineffective doesn’t represent virtuous behavior; it represents wasted time.
In the absence of alternatives, most participants worked on the unsolvable trials until the end of the time limit; however, in the presence of alternatives, participants high in optimism or self-mastery beliefs who were not allowed to return to previous trials disengaged from the unsolvable anagrams nearly 4 min sooner than participants low in such beliefs. Additionally, optimists tended to outperform participants low in optimism on the subsequent solvable trials when these trials were said to test an aspect of verbal intelligence different from the initial set. These results suggest that people high in optimism and self-mastery are able to disengage from unsolvable tasks in order to allocate effort to solvable tasks.
Surprisingly, that optimism matters. We know that confidence has a significant impact on performance, but enthusiasm does too.
’We have empirical evidence that deliberate practice, while important, …does not largely account for individual differences in performance. The question now is what else matters.’ And there are many possible answers. One is how early in life you were introduced to the activity — which, as the researchers explain, appears to have effects that go beyond how many years of practice you booked. Others include how open you are to collaborating and learning from others, and how much you enjoy the activity.
That last one — intrinsic motivation — has a huge empirical base of support in workplaces, schools, and elsewhere. We’ve long known that the pleasure one takes from an activity is a powerful predictor of success. For example, one group of researchers tried to sort out the factors that helped third and fourth graders remember what they had been reading. They found that how interested the students were in the passage was thirty times more important than how “readable” the passage was.
This motivation is important to keep in mind. One of my earliest and most trusted coaches used to always preach to me to end on a high note. I’d be frustrated and wanting “just one more,” 7 swings might become 15 which might become 50. The increasing frustration, however, often saps our intrinsic motivation to get back in the cage the next day and the next. Not letting ourselves get outworked is critical, but only when we do so with a strong level of self-awareness. Simply, we can ask ourselves “would I be better served focusing my attention elsewhere in this moment? Is repeating this action helping me or am I just trying to be a “hard worker?” Of course, being honest with ourselves is critical. Grit may not be the ultimate determiner of success, but laziness is likely to result in failure.
A 12-year Major League Baseball veteran who appeared in 1,104 career games and was a member of the 2004 Boston Red Sox World Series championship team, Gabe Kapler is a strength training and powerful food enthusiast who took a public stance against performance-enhancing drugs as a player.
Kapler has perpetually emphasized the importance of training outdoors and clean eating. To that end, he took to sharing information in 2013 and started a health and well-being blog at Kaplifestyle.com.
In the space, Kapler shares applicable advice on the procurement and cooking of whole foods, compares various workout philosophies and trends and interactively responds to questions from readers. Despite a full schedule that holds both family and work commitments, Kapler posts as often as possible, in addition to opening the space to readers, athletes and members of the media for guest blogs. He currently serves as Director, Player Development for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Prior, he was a baseball analyst for Fox Sports, combining an extensive playing background with an affinity for advanced baseball metrics, providing viewers with in-depth commentary and insight delivered in an understandable fashion. Kapler covered the 2014 All-Star Game and World Series before transitioning back to MLB with the Dodgers. From 2011-2013, he tackled special scouting assignments for the Tampa Bay Rays in addition to working with a team to build a startup company. After initially being selected by the Detroit Tigers in the 57th round of the 1995 MLB amateur draft, Kapler outperformed his longshot status, enjoying a meteoric rise in the club’s minor league system over his first three professional seasons. In 1998, he earned Minor League Player of the Year honors from USA Today, Baseball Weekly and the Sporting News after he set Southern League (AAA) single-season records for RBI (146), total bases (319), extra-base hits (87) and doubles (47). He also led the league in hits, home runs and runs scored that season, leading to his being named the Detroit organization’s No. 1 prospect by Baseball America. After breaking in with the Tigers toward the end of the 1998 season, Kapler went on to collect 799 hits and post a lifetime batting average of .268 over his 12 seasons with six different clubs. The crowning achievement of his career however, came when he was one of nine players on the field for the Red Sox recording of the final out in the 2004 World Series, a victory that snapped an 86-year championship drought for the franchise. Kapler is an angel investor in Coach Up, a service that connects athletes with private coaches. He also owns several real estate properties in Inglewood, CA.
Kapler has two sons, Chase (17) and Dane (15) and resides in Malibu, CA. In his free time, he enjoys cooking, lifestyle training and has a passion for music, naming Miles Davis, John Lee Hooker and Ali Farka Toure among his favorite artists.
You can follow Gabe on Twitter @GabeKapler and Instagram @GabeKapler
Pursuing diversity is a critical initiative, and often it’s one that requires uncomfortable effort.
I have spent most of my adult life in professional baseball clubhouses. I would look around and generally feel like it was a diverse environment. I had teammates that looked very different than I am, that spoke different languages, came from different countries and had different cultural and religious backgrounds. I felt comfortable speaking my mind about contentious topics and confident I’d be given respect by my teammates. I generally assumed my experience was true across the board.
Of course, that’s simply not true for everyone. Clubhouses and locker rooms haven’t traditionally been very welcoming spaces for a gay man; while I’m sure I’ve played with or against many, sports haven’t created a safe space for gay athletes to be themselves. There’s certainly not enough representation and diversity in leadership across the industry. Listening to stories from Black members of The Players Alliance and members of our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion council with the Giants, I know my experience isn’t the same for everyone.
I spent a lot of time this spring and summer listening to others. I know that women, people of color, non-binary people, members of the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities and others have faced significant challenges entering the workforce when it comes to the sports industry, and once hired, faced further challenges both staying in the industry and reaching leadership positions within it.
The reasons for this can be varied. People within these groups may know less about the jobs available. They may face obstacles in getting those jobs, whether because of resources, because of networks or not looking like the people already in those jobs. They may be seen as not as qualified as more privileged applicants. They may face subconscious bias. They may be preemptively discouraged from pursuing roles, or they may be ostracized from teams once they land a position. Put simply – these communities face challenges that white men simply don’t have to think about.
Many of us have found ourselves in the comfortable position of thinking we aren’t discriminatory because we don’t actively participate in discrimination. “I’m not racist because I’ve never used a racial slur” or “I’m not homophobic because I don’t hate gay people.” However, I’ve been part of several hiring processes now, and I recognize that I have biases. I know others do too. I challenge myself on these biases, but they exist. When I look to hire women, I find myself concerned with how they may be treated by men in the building. I worry that someone may be disrespectful or inappropriate. I wonder what happens if someone says something that is insensitive or inappropriate.
The typical reaction, then, is to put the burden on the woman. How will she handle it if that situation comes up? Will she be a distraction? What if she’s unhappy, or some of the men in the clubhouse are?
Often, a leader or an organization may choose the easy way out – hire a candidate that may be similarly qualified that won’t present the same dilemma. In other words, hire the male candidate.
You can substitute any other minority for this example and come to the same conclusion. The first ask that people in excluded communities usually make is that people with privilege (in my case, a white man) talk to other people with privilege, and the above is the in part the reason why. Too often, we in privileged positions put the burden back on those who have always borne it.
The reason this happens comes from fear. We as leaders are fearful of saying the wrong thing, of being called out, of being condemned or shamed. I know that I don’t have all of the information or education. I am doing my best to improve, but that doesn’t mean I won’t make mistakes. Like all humans, I want to say the right thing, but I sometimes hesitate, filtering anxiously, wondering if it’s going to come out the wrong way or if I’m inadvertently going to sound insensitive or exclusionary.
Because of that fear, passive discrimination continues to rule. Privilege lets those of us in power go on about our days, not talking about these fears. Our discomfort rules our behavior and contributes to the cycle that keeps the numbers egregiously disproportionate in sports. Why are so many commissioners white men? Why are there so few black and brown owners, GMs or managers across all the sports? Women? Non binary people? Trans people? Why have there been so few openly gay decision makers in sports? Why are there so many native Spanish speaking players, but so few people in power that can speak to them in their language?
Part of confronting this fear is acknowledging that it takes affirmative steps to engage our own biases. We should be talking openly about our behaviors, calling out inappropriate behavior in the workplace and discussing what the right behavior looks like. We can ask more questions and listen more often to others, rather than assuming their experiences mirror our own. We can acknowledge that these fears exist and mistakes will happen but that working towards more inclusive workspaces is the right thing to do anyway.
Starting Pipeline for Change was important to me because diversity matters. I am a better leader when I surround myself with people who see the world differently than I do. Having many different perspectives at the table means that we get new ideas, new solutions to problems, new ways of seeing issues. Listening to the stories of others means I may observe a player uncomfortable in a conversation that I would have missed before or see an opportunity to encourage a staff member to share contributions that are being overlooked. I believe more equitable environments are the only way organizations across all sports are going to avoid stagnation in and continue to expand their audiences.
While these are challenging issues now, they shouldn’t always be, and the only way we can get better is by continually taking steps, even when they’re uncomfortable.
as a player.
