Giants return home in deafening silence ahead of San Francisco Pride
The SF Giants return home as San Francisco Pride arrives in the city, the front office still silent about the team's Pride Night debacle.
Mark
The San Francisco Giants return tonight to Oracle Park, nearly two weeks after three of the team’s pitchers now-infamously attempted to use their uniforms to steal the Pride rainbow from the LGBTQ community.
In those nearly two weeks, the three players have tried to explain themselves, admitting last week that the controversy had gotten way bigger than they had anticipated. They wanted their statement to come and go so they could get back to playing baseball.
They should have thought of that before objecting to — wait for it — the LGBTQ community and its beloved rainbow flag in, of all places, San Francisco, the very city where that flag itself was invented by Gilbert Baker.
Facepalm.
Related
MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred blames Giants for mismanaging Pride Night hats
Manfred says the Giants did not convey to four players opposed to Pride Night hats that wearing them was an option.
Yet here they are, coming off of three straight losses to the middling Miami Marlins and home for the first time since the Pride cap debacle gained national attention, becoming one of the biggest talk stories in American pro sports.
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SF Giants struggling to win anything
The SF Giants have the third-worst record in Major League Baseball right now, buried 18 games behind the NL West rival Los Angeles Dodgers less than 80 games into the season. Since those three pitchers walked out onto the field at Oracle Park, the team has gone 3-6.
Yet what might be more, the front office could not have handled worse the aftermath of their failure to allow those three of their players to walk out of the dugout during the Giants Pride Night on June 12 wearing what they were wearing.
The front office of Major League Baseball has offered a couple statements, first telling Outsports exclusively that the players were being only warned. That action was, it was clear a week ago, not being taken for the content of their message but for policy forbidding writing on a game jersey.
No reasonable person thinks pro athletes should be allowed to just write messages on their game uniforms.
MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred followed up with a lengthier explanation, saying that their investigation determined the Giants team management failed the players with a “lapse in communication.”
To be sure, the players failed themselves. Whether they saw Clayton Kershaw in a Dodgers dugout — not on the field — wearing a Pride hat with a similar Bible verse written on it a couple years ago doesn’t excuse the players’ need to steal thunder from the LGBTQ community on the one out 81 home games celebrating Pride.
As the team now returns to the scene of the debacle, the Giants front office has still not said a word. San Francisco Chronicle sports columnist Ann Killion said the Chronicle had tried to talk with President of Baseball Operations Buster Posey, but he’s declined every request.
The silence is defeaning.
“It’s one thing to lose baseball games at an astonishing pace,” Killion wrote this week. “It’s another thing to lose your dignity and your culture.”
Reports are that Posey will address the media today at 2pm. It’s unknown if he’ll address this topic.
If he doesn’t and if the SF Giants don’t do something about this in the coming days, their participation in the San Francisco Pride Parade this coming Sunday won’t end well for them.
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