SANTA CLARA

Brian Hoyer is in the first week of official practice as a 49ers quarterback. You can already see why he’s here.

Mostly, he is not Colin Kaepernick. Or for short. the Anti-Kap.

Oh, the 49ers won’t say it that way. But when they acquired Hoyer as their all-but-certain starter for the 2017 season, new general manager John Lynch and new head coach Kyle Shanahan knew what they were getting. Hoyer is a mostly steady, non-spectacular quarterback with a usually accurate arm who will provide zero drama away from the field. He is 180 degrees different from Kaepernick, who could be either mercurially thrilling or strangely ineffectual–and as we know, a lightning-rod personality after taking off his helmet.

We’ll see how that plays out for the 49ers in the long term. In the springtime getting-to-know-you term. Hoyer is fitting in as planned. He is a 31-year-old professional eager to do his job. At Tuesday’s practice, he performed his repetitions efficiently. He couldn’t be more pleased to be working in Northern California. He has acquired a dwelling in Saratoga that permits a reasonable commute. This is Hoyer’s seventh NFL team. He loves the scenery. Literally.

“When you’re playing other places, you hear guys who have played out here,” Hoyer said. “And they talk about how great it is and they tell you how much you’ll love California. And you go, ‘Yeah, okay.’ And then you move here and experience it and say, ‘Okay, you’re probably right.’ There’s so much to like . . . other than the traffic and cost of living, I guess. But you walk out there for practice in this weather and look around and say, ‘That’s our view for practice?’ ”

Hoyer did not mean the theme park roller coasters next door at Great America. He meant the Diablo Range mountains and bright blue sky on a gorgeous spring day.

In Hoyer’s eyes, all of that is fresh. The 49ers clearly wish him to perform the same freshen-up function for an offense that went nowhere last season under Kaepernick and Blaine Gabbert, both now gone.

Years from now, historians will document Kaepernick’s 2016 season as one where his anthem-kneeling protests made more news than his football. For 49ers season ticket holders, the bigger issue was the team’s losing record with Kap the last two seasons. How much of it was his fault? We can sit here and take phone calls all night to argue about that. But there was a parenthetical issue with Kaepernick that must have caused the 49ers to sigh and clinch their teeth. And it had nothing to do with pregame kneeling.

Sports fans like to take the ride with a player and his team. Kap never made it easy. In his early years as a 49ers starter, he gave short clipped answers and generally behaved at postgame pressers as if he wanted to be anywhere else. This fed the false impression that Kaepernick he was a surly, non-deep thinker. That was hardly the case, as we saw in 2016. When Kaepernick began his activism, he took on all questions and gave lengthy answers. His teammates voted him the Len Eshmont Award for inspirational play and courage, hardly an honor for a surly man.

Yet for all that, Kaepernick’s personality and football remained hard for fans to access and embrace — in the same way that, say, Stephen Curry will allow the Warriors’ tribe inside his life to some degree so they can share his joy of competition. In slightly different ways, Madison Bumgarner of the Giants and Derek Carr of the Raiders do the same.

Hoyer, upon initial read, is also willing to open the door a little bit, as witnessed by those remarks about the view from the practice field. He has not uttered a political word but has already made a hospital visit to sick kids. He entered the NFL as an undrafted player out of Michigan State, signed by New England to sit the bench behind Tom Brady. That can make a man humble. It’s a small thing. But if the 49ers are going to lose more than they win this season — and they are — then Sundays can be more tolerable if the team’s quarterback is more engaging and willing to explain himself rather than repeating the phrase “poor execution” over and over.

So far, Lynch and Shanahan have also done well for themselves by opening the door to their thinking. The two’s obvious chemistry was one reason Hoyer signed on with the 49ers.

“Having a general manager and coach who are on the same page is so important,” Hoyer said. “I’ve seen places that aren’t that way and that causes a lot of problems.”

Hoyer was not specific. But it’s easy to guess one of those “places.” Shanahan and Hoyer have a previous relationship. In 2014, the two men were together in Cleveland, where Shanahan was the Browns’ offensive coordinator and made Hoyer a starter until the front office began agitating to see rookie Johnny Manziel on the field and eventually ordered coaches to play him.

Shanahan’s choice here was all his own. Back in March, he was asked why the 49ers didn’t try to retain Kaepernick (who has still not found employment with another team) as opposed to picking up Hoyer, who was in Chicago last season. Hoyer does own a better winning percentage as a NFL starter (16-16, .500) than Kaepernick (25-29, .463). But that’s not why Shanahan said he didn’t want to keep Kaepernick..

“I think Colin has a certain skill-set that you can put a specific offense to it that he can be very successful in,” Shanahan told reporters in March. “That wasn’t necessarily the direction I wanted to go . . .The type of offense I want to run was somewhat different.”

Tuesday afternoon, we received the first glimpse of that offense as quarterbacked by Hoyer and his presumptive backups, Matt Barkley and rookie C.J. Beathard. It was all basic foundational stuff on just the 49ers’ second day of Organized Team Activities. (Why don’t they simply call them practices?)

Shanahan says his depth chart is “not locked in.” But in the scrimmage portion of the day, Hoyer definitely threw downfield with more authority than Beathard and with more accuracy than Barkley.

“I feel it’s been a smoother transition than in Cleveland,” Hoyer said, explaining that Shanahan’s play calling terminology requires “a lot of words.”

With Shanahan responsible for the reboot of so many other areas of the 49ers roster, it’s understandable that he would prefer a quarterback who knows the system. Persistent rumors have it that Shanahan and Lynch will find a way to get Washington quarterback Kirk Cousins to the 49ers for the 2018 season. So Hoyer’s window of opportunity here could be short. But he seems comfortable with that, as well as with Shanahan’s new role.

“For me, he’s calling my plays just like he did before, with the Browns,” said Hoyer, the Anti-Kap. “The only difference is, sometimes I turn around to ask a question and he’s with the defense.”

If memory serves, Kaepernick never spontaneously offered up an anecdote like that. But of course, he was the Anti-Hoyer.