CINCINNATI — A few hours before one of the Giants’ most thrilling baseball games in recent memory, manager Gabe Kapler struck a solemn tone in the dugout.
“I think you’ve noticed the last couple days, my mood in here has been especially light and playful,” he told reporters gathered in the dugout Tuesday at Oracle Park for a routine pregame question-and-answer session. “Today, it’s not.”
The massacre earlier that day at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, that killed 19 children and two teachers, was weighing heavily on his mind. Not long after his pregame address, Kapler stood with the rest of the stadium in a moment of silence honoring the victims, then watched Metallica play the national anthem.
Reflecting a couple days later in a post on his personal blog, Kapler said he wished he had done more than stand. He would have taken a knee, like he did amid the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, because he felt the tragedy was only the latest example of the country not living up to the values espoused in its national anthem.
“Every time I place my hand over my heart and remove my hat, I’m participating in a self congratulatory glorification of the ONLY country where these mass shootings take place,” Kapler wrote on Friday. “On Wednesday, I walked out onto the field, I listened to the announcement as we honored the victims in Uvalde. I bowed my head. I stood for the national anthem. Metallica riffed on City Connect guitars.
“My brain said drop to a knee; my body didn’t listen. I wanted to walk back inside; instead I froze. I felt like a coward. I didn’t want to call attention to myself. I didn’t want to take away from the victims or their families. There was a baseball game, a rock band, the lights, the pageantry. I knew that thousands of people were using this game to escape the horrors of the world for just a little bit. I knew that thousands more wouldn’t understand the gesture and would take it as an offense to the military, to veterans, to themselves.
“But I am not okay with the state of this country. I wish I hadn’t let my discomfort compromise my integrity. I wish that I could have demonstrated what I learned from my dad, that when you’re dissatisfied with your country, you let it be known through protest. The home of the brave should encourage this.”
Kapler was one of a select few members of MLB to kneel for the national anthem in 2020, telling reporters at the time that “I wanted to use my platform to demonstrate my dissatisfaction with the way we’ve handled racism in our country.” But he stopped doing so in 2021, explaining that “our country and our dialogue has changed, and with that change, I think it’s important that my actions change, too … I believe the stories shouldn’t be about me and about what I’m doing during the anthem. They should be about the people in our country who are hurt by these systems, and about the work being done to bring about positive change.”
