Being Gabe Kapler: Inside the mind of the San Francisco Giants' nonconformist manager

THE WATCH ON Gabe Kapler's left wrist started as a curiosity and traveled a smooth path to obsession. Big, chunky and obviously expensive, it was both striking and vexing. Morning or afternoon, the time on the watch bore no resemblance to the actual time of day.

Even more vexing, the time was never identifiable as being wrong in a way that made sense. It wasn't just a little off, and it wasn't aligned with a non-Pacific time zone. It was just wrong, randomly, and it made me wonder whether the watch was some outward manifestation of the man's internal clock. Kapler, the San Francisco Giants' manager, is meticulous in just about every way. Health, fitness, nutrition, fashion, facial hair — everything seems to be exquisitely calibrated to some faraway decimal few strive to reach.

Then there was the watch. I tried unsuccessfully to discern some logic in its errancy. Could this watch, sitting just above one of his pneumatic-clamp hands and just below one of his phlebotomist's-dream forearms, be just another way for Kapler to display his counterculture bona fides?

Because this is not the traditional baseball guy. He does not talk like one or act like one or even look like one. He is a baseball guy, of course, but the rare one who seldom shows emotion, almost never gets thrown out of games and carries himself with finely tuned stoicism. Last year, Kapler's first full season as manager, the Giants won 107 games and a National League West title — perhaps the most shocking season of any team in the past two decades. The season was such a wild surprise that it raised expectations for whatever came next. Yet Kapler spent spring training repeating the same answer: «We're not trying to replicate last year.» And then the Giants went