3 takeaways from San Francisco Giants spring training

San Francisco Giants spring training: Gabe Kapler seeing “adjustments” to new rules

With almost a week’s worth of spring training games in the books, Giants manager Gabe Kapler has noticed how his team and coaching staff is now settling in with MLB’s new rules regarding the shift and pitch clock.

“I see a lot of adjustments happening and people are getting up to speed. There’s some discomfort early on, but usually that discomfort is about not having experienced it. So the more we experience it as a staff, the more we experience it as players, the better we are equipped to handle it,” Kapler said on Friday. “I mean, even myself and our coaching staff feel like we have more knowledge of the rules in the early stages than we did a week ago. We just had a great meeting with with Mike Hill (senior vice president of on-field operations for Major League Baseball) and his staff, which was really valuable. We talked about it for an hour-plus. Major League Baseball has done a really nice job of getting on the same page with the managers and the players so that we’re all working on this together. It’s just really nicely done by Major League Baseball so far.”

Kapler said he and his staff are also taking time between innings to get information on the rule changes as well.

“Just going out there and getting clarification on something and asking things like, ‘Why did you call it a little bit early (with the pitch clock)?’ Just want to make sure we understand it,” Kapler said. “We want to ask, ‘Hey, what did you guys see? Why did you call that?’ This way we’re prepared so that when they call it in the regular season, we’re not surprised by it. And we can educate our pitchers better too.”