MANY THINGS CONSIDERED: Giants Turn Pygmy

By Marc C. Johnson

I’ve been a San Francisco Giants fan for as long as I have been a baseball fan. I’m not completely sure why.

I have never lived in the City by the Bay, however I’ve visited many times and came to love the place. My own affection certainly dates to the great Giant Willie Mays whose picture – thanks to a fellow fan and friend – graces my office wall.

Mays, McCovey, Cepeda, Marichal, all in the Hall of Fame along with Giants that came before my fandom – Mel Ott, The Great Mathewson, the Fordham Flash Frankie Frisch (before he became a Cardinal). Even the controversial Bonds. Damn him. What a player.

More recently my regard centered on great Giants like Matt Williams and Will “The Thrill’ Clark and the perpetually grumpy Madison Bumgarner – Mad Bum. And, of course, the almost certain future Hall of Famer, Buster Posey.

But now, in a way that only a true love can hurt you, my Giants have hurt me, and themselves and their great city.

On so many levels the mangling by Giants owners and management of a four player protest of Pride Night earlier this month was an own goal of stupidity, arrogance, gutlessness, fear and did I mention stupidity.

I’ve been mulling this mess and my team for two weeks now and I’m still pissed.

From icons to cowards

If you’re not a baseball fan or otherwise missed this story of stupidity and fear here are the relevant details:

• The Giants organization has celebrated Pride Night for more than 20 years and beginning in 2021 the team has worn special game caps with a rainbow logo.
• The Giants organization has been baseball’s leader in raising awareness of HIV/Aids and then raising money to fight the awful disease. They raise money for prostate cancer research, too, among other worthy community causes.
• Not surprisingly the city’s large LGBTQ population embraced the Pride celebration and embraced the team and organization in the process.
• This year the Giants marketed the event as Pride Night at Oracle Park featuring postgame fireworks and music from LGBTQ artists. There was a corporate sponsor for the events.
• Three Giants pitchers – Landen Roupp, JT Brubaker, and Ryan Walker – thought it an appropriate occasion to inscribe a Bible verse on those Pride caps in protest of the team’s celebration of inclusiveness. A fourth pitcher, Sam Hentges, just refused to wear the Pride cap. All these guys are very well compensated, comfortable, privileged white males who claim to be Christians in that curious way that empowers true believers to shun or belittle those they deem less worthy.
• The protesting players mumbled something about not believing in Pride Night (or the humanity of gay Americans), or disagreeing with something or other, but definitely not “hating.” Or, as Walker said of his protest, it was about putting “Jesus over baseball,” but apparently only when Jesus can be invoked to disrespect gay baseball fans.
• Major League Baseball admonished the players, but did not levy fines for violating a rule negotiated by players and owners that prohibits personal messages on a uniform.
• The Trump Justice Department jumped into the fray – of course they did – saying there would be an investigation of whether the player’s religious freedom was somehow violated.
• Giants management effectively did nothing, well nothing but dink off a sizable portion of the fan base, while looking like the newly fashioned San Francisco Pygmies.

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Here’s the great sportswriter Howard Bryant:

What remains of the Giants is embodied by their owner, Charles Johnson, the 93-year-old shadow power behind right-wing politics and causes. The players in protest reflect their owner and not their city, and the face of the front office – Buster Posey – was supposed to represent the best of the franchise: a three-time World Series champion, Giants icon as a player, fan favorite and trusted hope to turn around a club that has failed in recent years after winning a franchise-record 107 games in 2021. He didn’t.

Facing a suddenly energized San Francisco media demanding answers for its city on Tuesday, the baby-faced Posey looked small and distant, surprisingly in a place but not of the place whose fans once adorned his jersey more than any other. Posey sat in the dugout annoyed, clinging stubbornly to the line that he would only answer “baseball questions”. When that did not end the questioning, he waited, childlike, to be rescued meekly by his public relations department, the supposed leader unable to lead for himself. Posey didn’t even know how to say the right things to the city on behalf of the franchise, even if they did not suit his personal values – which is more often than not half of the job.

The video of Posey evading questions about this fiasco is truly painful to watch. It feels sort of like what I imagine fouling a ball off your instep feels like, except doing it five or six times in a row.

Posey is also struggling through a throughly disastrous season that he is almost exclusively responsible for, making his awful showing with the San Francisco press somehow even worse, so enter Giants CEO Larry Baer on a clean up mission that just made things worse:

“Yes we’ve learned a lot in the last 11 days. Yes we could have handled things better this year for sure. We’re absolutely committed to continuing our conversations with members of the LGBTQ+ community going forward.

“I wanted to deliver that message to the fans and move on, and be able to talk about some other things.”

Continuing our conversations.

Talk about some other things.

Maybe like a 33-48 record?

Or a conversation about bigotry in a ball cap?

Even discussing the team’s dismal record is apparently preferable to an apology or even an explanation as to how a two decade old gay pride celebration, in one of America’s most diverse and welcoming cities, got hijacked by four baseball playing (if you can call it that) homophobes.

Trumpification

I suspect most of us know what is really going on here. The Trumpification of every freaking thing in our country and our culture.

The Giants principal owner is a huge Trump supporter, and a 93-year old billionaire. The Trump Justice Department threatens Major League Baseball and indirectly the team with an investigation. Buster Posey goes all lockjaw amid speculation that he was told to pull a Sargent Schultz and “know nothing, nothing” about anything, anything.

As one fan told the San Francisco Standard:

“I never had any illusions that professional athletes shared my politics. Baseball is an escape, and then here’s the culture war right here,” he said, adding it was “MAGA creeping into my baseball team.”

A several billion dollar enterprise, as the Giants are, one of the biggest brands in professional sports, turn out to be as gutless as white shoe New York law firms or an Ivy League university or a Silicon Valley tech bro or a Republican United States senator.

Some will dismiss a protest against inclusiveness as just another senseless chapter in our endless “cultural wars,” and the apparent endless need for some “Christians” to proselytize about what they are against. But this protest was designed to signal some personal virtue and it screams “I’m better” than the “other” person that I’m against.

And the team response was simply to give in to such bullying and, yes, to hate.

This is who we have become.

And, damn it, people with billion dollar platforms need to stop being such fearful, spineless fools. Act like you can face a 95 mile an hour fastball rather than cower in a corner of the dugout.

Here’s a real message

I spent a lot of years in the crisis management business advising clients on what to say and how to act when the pressure is on. Buster Posey, Larry Baer, the rookie manager Tony Vitello, indeed the Giants organization from bottom to top fouled off every possible PR rule and in the process crushed the brand.

Here’s what they might have said had the team the character I once proudly valued in the organization:

The player protest of Pride Night was totally inappropriate, an insult to our fans, our city and ultimately to their teammates. We say without equivocation these players do not represent the San Francisco Giants. And on behalf of the organization we apologize.

While we respect the player’s right to their individual religious beliefs, the Giants organization does not equate a violation of uniform rules with religious beliefs, but rather as a statement of disrespect for thousands of our friends and neighbors.

The player’s actions were clearly aimed at one segment of our community, a group historically discriminated against, marginalized and hurt. We deeply regret that this harmful message was sent and we have conveyed in direct and impossible to misunderstand language that the players should apologize to our fans, our city and their teammates.

It is worth noting that the San Francisco Giants have long supported and celebrated other important members of the community with events like Fiesta Gigantes Saturday and heritage theme nights for our Filipino and Aloha communities. The Giants would not tolerate a protest aimed at these communities just as we will not tolerate disrespect and intolerance directed at Pride Night and those who celebrate it.

That such a statement was not made tells us all about character … and fear.

And you know what.

With this administration we’re not that far away from someone protesting Jackie Robinson Day – Trump’s Defense Department already tried to erase Robinson’s military service – or protesting Rafael Devers for being a Dominican.

The hell with the U.S. Justice Department.

If you can’t tell those hateful clowns to buzz off in this stupid circumstance how can you consider yourself anything but a timid, fearful co-conspirator enabling just more and more authoritarian demagoguery?

I’m left steaming

I hoping my team will grow a backbone, but doubt they will. This is who they have become.

So let me suggest a new team motto for the guys who play at Oracle Park, a baseball palace named for the firm owned by the guy who bankrolled the deal that is destroying CBS News, while also paying out millions to further the corrupt, malevolent rule of our Mango Mussolini.

The new motto might be the last line of Mark Harris’s classic 1956 novel Bang the Drum Slowly.

The narrator of the novel, Henry “Author” Wiggen, a pitcher, watches during the season as his teammates belittle and humiliate a second string catcher, Bruce Pearson – masterfully played in the film adaptation by Robert De Niro – without knowing that Bruce is dealing with a fatal illness.

Wiggen observes all the meanness and lack of empathy for a guy not quite up to the rough and tumble of a baseball field or the nastiness of a clubhouse, and in the last line of the book he says:

“From here on in I rag nobody.”

The Giants ought to frame that quote and hang it in their clubhouse.