Hey, welcome back to One Thing.
I'm David Rind.
And as Pride Month comes to an end, some LGBTQ sports fans are feeling sidelined.
Read the room you play in San Francisco.
Probably one of the queerest cities in the world.
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My girlfriend at the time was our second date, and she took me to the stadium.
It was opening night.
It was fireworks.
We sat up in the nosebleed seats, and we saw the beautiful view of the bay.
We drank craft beer and ate garlic fries and watched the game and I had absolutely no idea what was going on.
Terry Hupfer never expected to be a fan of the San Francisco Giants baseball team.
She was not a sports fan at all when she moved to San Francisco in 1985.
She chose the city because she felt she wouldn't have to hide her sexual orientation there.
Even so, Terry, who is a lesbian, did not expect to feel welcome in a baseball stadium.
She thought pro sports were macho and, frankly, homophobic.
But when Terry went on that date to the Giants game in 2010, she was pleasantly surprised to find the exact opposite.
And she's been a diehard fan ever since.
I always felt welcome.
And I was thrilled when you know, at one point they did um until there's a cure day.
They always had pride days.
And one year my girlfriend and I were at a pride game and we were on the kiss cam.
Because, you know, usually when the Kiss Cam goes, it shows heterosexual people on the Kiss Cam.
But it was Pride Night, so we were on the Kiss Cam.
And what did that mean to you to have a space like that?
It was really nice.
It was like a way that people from different walks of life could connect.
But a few weeks ago at this year's Pride Night, her feelings toward the team started to change.
Major League Baseball and the San Francisco Giants under pressure Tuesday as blowback continues over the decision of three players to write Bible verses on their special Pride Night caps last week.
We're gonna dig into this controversy in a bit, but long story short is, after these players staged what appeared to be a protest against the team's Pride Night uniforms, the team and the league have come under fire for how it has handled the situation.
On Monday, Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred placing blame squarely on the Giants organization for not clearly communicating with players.
Responding to a letter from Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri.
Senator Hawley accused the league of discriminating against Christian players.
Assistant Attorney General Harvey Dillon has asked the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to investigate.
Even Vice President J.D.
Vance weighed in.
He wrote on X, quote, Trump won.
We don't have to do this anymore.
And on Fox News, some even questioned the idea of Pride Nights altogether.
What is baseball doing having a pride night?
You're forcing people to take a position.
And to me, you put these guys in an impossible position.
God forbid they do something besides sports and stand for something besides a strikeout.
This incident has Giants fans like Terry questioning their fandom.
The Giants initially responded by saying they were sorry for any pain the players' actions caused the LGBTQ community.
But Terry is especially outraged by what she sees as the team's failure to more forcefully back its LGBTQ fans and engage with the issue further in the days since.
As a result, she's not sure if the organization still possesses that welcoming, inclusive spirit that made her a fan 16 years ago.
The fact that the Giants, as an organization which for years has been supportive of the queer community,
And as a lot of people said on social media, read the room you play in San Francisco.
Probably one of the queerest cities in the world.
I just care about like acknowledge, acknowledge that this was an error acknowledge, and not only acknowledge but say that no, this isn't who the Giants are.
The Giants are not a homophobic organization who doesn't support the community and the city in which they live.
So I just want the Giants to do that.
But if they don't, then I guess I'm looking for a new baseball team.
In a few moments, I'll sign a historic executive order to ban men from competing in women's sports.
It's about time.
This all comes at a moment when the second Trump administration and many Republican-led state legislatures have been enormously hostile towards the LGBTQ community.
They want men playing in women's sports.
They want transgender for everybody.
They never stop.
From removing words like transgender and queer from the Stonewall Inn National Monument website to restricting access to gender identity care to a looming Supreme Court decision on whether transgender women can compete in women's sports.
This group says it's clear they're under threat.
There's also been a shift in how Americans feel about these issues.
A recent CNN poll found that in the past year, both registered Republicans and independents have become more likely to say that society's level of acceptance of different cultures, gender identities, sexual orientations and backgrounds has gone too far.
Now, these aren't the top issues on the mind of most Americans, but these conversations are often among the loudest.
So what does this MLB moment tell us about?
Whether fans should look to professional sports for guidance on social issues?
And how much of this is business, politics, or all of the above?
Hannah Kaiser covers sports, and she was a baseball beat reporter before joining us here at CNN.
So, Hannah, can you just remind us, how did this all start?
So every team except for the Texas Rangers, so 29 of the 30 major league baseball teams, host some sort of pride night.
When the San Francisco Giants held their pride night, Three of their pitchers starter Landon Rope, Ryan Walker, JT Brubaker two of their relievers added to their pride hats the San Francisco Giants hat with the logo rendered in the rainbow flag.
They added a reference to Genesis 9, in which a rainbow represents God's promise to never again destroy all life in a flood.
And this got attention first from Major League Baseball, who issued them a verbal warning after the fact, reminding them please don't write on your uniforms.
And then that verbal warning not to write on uniforms gathered attention as far up as Vice President JD.
Vance.
And this has sort of ballooned into a culture war.
There's a Justice Department investigation, I believe, still underway.
This has put a lot of spotlight on how the league does and does not celebrate LGBTQ plus fans.
And just to be clear, these uniforms that the Giants had for their pride celebration.
They're different than the regular uniforms.
They were special for this occasion.
They were special for this occasion.
So MLB's had some form of Pride Night for a while.
Back in 2022.
The Giants and the Dodgers were the only two teams prior to that who did any kind of Pride Night uniforms.
So they wear uniforms that have a little patch or have rainbow insignia or the hat.
The logo on the hat is a rainbow.
In fact in 2022.
Interestingly, the Giants and Dodgers played each other and both teams wore Pride Night uniforms at that time.
And it was considered this huge success, this beautiful moment in which competitors on the field could sort of come together in support of this particular cause.
That year, 2022, the Tampa Bay Rays tried to do the same thing.
They also added a pride night or a uniform element to their pride night celebration.
At the time, five players on the Rays refused to wear the pride hats and wore their regular Rays hats.
And what's interesting is, if you go back to that moment 2022, and look at some of what was said on both sides, both the Rays deputized one pitcher, Jason Adam, who hadn't worn the pride hat, to talk about why they hadn't.
And he was, like You know, we can disagree with his particular position, but pretty thoughtful about it.
And yet there was still all this kind of uproar.
And so the following year 2023, Rob Manfred, commissioner of Major League Baseball, said that they no longer were allowing teams to make uniforms part of their individual roles.
Team night celebrations.
So there are 12 sort of MLB holidays that everybody celebrates in a uniform way.
That includes Jackie Robinson.
Right, they all wear 42.
Yeah, but that like Mother's Day and Father's Day actually also fall into this.
And in 2023, Manfred said Rob Manfred, commissioner of Major League Baseball, said don't do any other uniform things basically.
And the Giants and Dodgers at the time specifically requested to be allowed to continue to wear the rainbow versions of their uniforms on Pride Night because of how important the queer fan base is in those markets in San Francisco and in Los Angeles.
And because of the sort of specific history that those organizations have with that cause.
So the Giants have been celebrating some version of, I guess you could call it pride.
They had like an HIV AIDS awareness night dating back to 1994.
The Dodgers were the team of both Billy Bean and Glenn Burke, the first two Major League Baseball players to eventually come out as gay.
They came out after they retired.
And in fact, this year, on their Pride night, the Dodgers unveiled a permanent memorial to Glenn Burke and Billy Beane.
And interestingly, when we get into some of the specifics of what happened in San Francisco, the Dodgers had a player this year, Blake Trinan, who did not wear the pride hat.
He wore his normal Dodgers hat because, as part of that 2023 edict from Manfred in which he said please don't do uniform things for Pride nights, carving out an exemption for the Dodgers and Giants.
He said but you have to allow the players who don't want to wear the hats to wear their normal hats.
On the Giants and Dodgers.
The idea being that certain players may not hold certain beliefs and they don't want to box them in by making them wear this particular uniform.
Yes.
And I will say that the politicians who have taken issue with the way this have played out have.
In some ways a legitimate case in that the 27 other teams who celebrate Pride do not do the uniform part, because we've seen that this can be an issue.
All of that said, we predicted this.
Manfred predicted this.
That's why he carved out that exemption for the Giants and Dodgers, because they have a very important queer fan base.
And then carved out an exemption to that exemption in which he said just wear your normal uniforms if you don't want to wear the pride uniforms.
I mean and in the end the outrage seems to be from some politicians and folks on the right that these players were having their religious beliefs discriminated against.
But it's right there in the rules, right, that you can't draw on your uniforms.
So what is exactly the beef here?
And that is what we will, I guess, perhaps find out if they do a more thorough investigation exactly how sort of strenuously and completely they enforce this rule.
But it comes up a fair amount.
Players are not allowed to write anything on their uniforms.
This is a collectively bargained rule between Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association.
And I actually think this feels like a sort of pedantic point, but it's one worth harping on.
In a very real sense.
They were allowed to wear these hats because nobody called down to the field and said hey, get these guys new hats.
And that will happen.
We have seen mid-game players forced to change out their uniforms because of things like they had a you know some sort of design on their glove that was distracting if they were the pitcher, or they were wearing the wrong shoes for the uniforms that day, or whatever.
So, in a very real sense, the Major League Baseball did allow these guys to stage what amounts to a protest because they wrote on their hats.
They took the field, people saw it, they wore it for the whole game and then mlb said hey, you can't wear these hats in the future, but they're not going to wear them in the future because pride night already happened.
All right, gotta take a break.
When we come back, a giants team executive meets the press and things get a little awkward.
Stick around.
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So how did the Giants and the broader league respond to some of this pushback that they've been hearing?
So initially, the Giants attempted to, as an organization, back their fan base.
They said, we're proud to support Pride Night and the LGBTQ plus community.
We also respect that individuals may make personal choices about participating in team activations.
But they acknowledged that we understand the choice made by these individuals has caused pain and anger to many in the LGBTQ plus community and we are sorry for that.
Those choices do not change our organization's commitment to inclusion, belonging and creating a welcoming environment for all.
That was sort of before it got as big as it has.
Since then.
I would say they've handled it perhaps less well when having to actually address the media about this.
What I thought was really interesting from a baseball perspective in the way Rob Manford responded was that Rob Manford in Major League Baseball completely threw the giants under the bus and essentially said this must have been a lack of communication between the team and the players.
I guess they didn't know that they could just wear their regular giants uniforms.
Okay, i'll start and then we can go to questions.
Uh, I'd like to recognize that the organization has shared its response to Pride Night and I understand that there's strong feelings on this topic.
And so, understandably, people wanted to talk to the Giants about this.
You know, our focus is on the team right now, the upcoming draft, the trade deadline.
And President of Baseball Operations.
Buster Posey, longtime player, local legend, very familiar with the San Francisco fan base, played his whole career there, won three World Series there.
He had a press conference earlier this week or a media availability.
I mentioned that I'm not going to revisit it.
So if you want to ask baseball questions, I'll answer baseball questions.
In which sure yes, he kind of acknowledged this media maelstrom up front, but then refused to take any questions about it whatsoever and repeatedly insisted he would only take quote unquote baseball questions.
Did he reach out to the gay community about any of this or no?
Again, if you want to go baseball questions, I made my statement on it.
I'll answer baseball questions.
You know, they're a mess on the field.
They've done this unconventional thing, hiring a college manager to be a major league manager.
And what it really feels like people have honed in on is like where was the communication breakdown?
Are you guys talking about these issues in the clubhouse?
Both you're allowed to not wear the pride hats, but also, are you talking about these issues in the clubhouse?
What it means to this fan base?
Why do you want to only answer baseball questions?
There's some very important matters that the public is debating outside this organization.
I'm going to answer baseball questions.
You know you talk to the Giants fan or you heard from that Giants fan that the fans are upset, that the players are protesting Pride Night.
And for the team to not address that, I think it is going to alienate some people.
Yeah, that's what I wanted to ask, because this is a city and a team that is steeped in this local culture of a history of LGBTQ issues going back decades.
So it would seem hard to believe that someone like Buster Posey, who played for the team for such a long time, wouldn't have some kind of awareness about that.
So is this like a truly a baseball thing, or is this a moment where The team is kind of looking at the political winds of the country and how LGBTQ issues have been talked about by the Trump administration and maybe say oh, this is a moment where we kind of have to like, take a backseat here and be quiet about some of this stuff so we don't anger some of these really loud voices on the right even further?
Yeah, I would say that Major League Baseball's tactic on these issues has felt notably different under the second Trump administration than they were before under Biden.
But even dating back to the first Trump administration, there does feel like there has been a notable shift.
And I think you know, early on last season when we saw MLB quietly changed some of the language on their website to not include words like diversity and inclusion.
And they did away very quietly with some of these sort of diversity initiative pipelines where they made them less demographic specific.
There was a lot of uproar around that.
And the league defended itself at the time by kind of saying like we have to sort of stay on the right side of these shifting diversity, equity and inclusion laws and policies.
But that is not necessary.
That does not apply to kind of how they talk about this particular controversy.
They could take a much more definitive stance on these issues.
I thought this was so interesting looking at that 2022 game, the Pride Night, where both the Dodgers and Giants participated.
Giant's manager at the time, Gabe Kapler, said, it is an honor to be a part of this moment.
I hope everyone watching sees the clear statement being made.
We stand for equality and respect of all people.
And at the time he said, wearing the Pride logo is a reminder of the discrimination the LGBT community faces and the importance of supporting and creating a more inclusive environment.
That was in 2022.
The year before that, 2021 MLB, Major League Baseball, Rob Manfred moved the All-Star game out of Atlanta in response to these oppressive voter rights laws that Georgia was trying to pass.
Right, I remember that.
That was a huge deal at the time.
And at the time, Manfred explained that by saying I have decided that the best way to demonstrate our values as a sport is by relocating this year's All-Star Game and MLB draft.
That at the time they were taking this position, that the league and that the teams can have values that they, that they and and the language you're seeing right now is much more we don't have values that that, in that all our rules are very uniform based they're.
Whatever it is a market change for them to say like We don't want to be projecting any kind of social value.
And that's an even bigger market change from previous eras of baseball.
Bud Seelig, the last commissioner, said in 2019 I believe baseball is a social institution and you know.
Therefore, it should take a leadership role in social issues.
So I think that we are seeing in Major League Baseball and in sports leagues writ large this attempt to, without explicitly walking back things they said in the past, not be a leader on the social forefront, on the sort of social causes.
What the politicians who have waited on this seem to be doing just to my perspective, is looking for examples in which they can claim to be the persecuted party, despite you know, JD.
Vance's tweet in response to this was like, we don't have to do this anymore.
Trump won.
And yet they're still trying to occupy this ground of the besieged.
They want like this idea that sort of Christian athletes are the persecuted group within Major League Baseball.
It's pretty absurd.
If you look around Major League Baseball, there is so much Christianity.
You see players all the time wearing like team logoed or at least sort of team colored shirts that say like Jesus won.
They wear them to media availabilities.
They wear them to batting practice.
They have.
Bible study groups, they talk about this a lot.
Like, no one pushes back on that.
Yeah, I was going to say because, to be fair, one of the players who took part in this little protest he said that he wasn't anti any of these values, just kind of what he believed in.
He said he had gay friends.
But like...
You're in these dugouts and in these spaces a lot covering these sports.
Like is this a moment where athletes might be more emboldened to take some of these stances in a little more vocal way, even if you're saying that baseball already kind of has a lot of this coding out and about?
Yeah, I would say that baseball players have probably felt pretty safe in this.
I mean, we have seen other examples.
Last year, Clayton Kershaw did a similar thing on writing on his hat.
Last year Blake Trinan, a Dodgers pitcher who did not wear the Pride hat this year, and that kind of flew under the radar.
He did not write anything.
He just wore the normal hat.
Last year, Blake Trinan wrote Charlie Kirk on his hat in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination.
So I do think players... of that persuasion are maybe pushing the limits a little bit.
But I think that that is in some ways a response to the couple of years before.
I really do think we saw like some genuine progress around these issues dating back to that kind of Biden administration era.
Yeah, and on the progress front, I think a lot of LGBTQ Americans, whether they're baseball fans or not, might look at this moment as a kind of step back after decades of progress.
And I guess I'm wondering...
Do we see this as a moment where they might stop looking to sports as a place where some of that progress can be made or those values upheld going forward?
I think that is such an interesting question.
And in trying to reckon with it, I really came back to this idea that we live in an increasingly fractured society.
And what we are, I think, seeing in this particular moment is that these really big leagues, the major men's American sports leagues, are having a hard time spanning that divide, that spectrum, and appealing to virtually everyone.
And part of their sort of business mandate, as all businesses struggle with.
This is the how do you be everything to everyone, indefinitely?
But where I think we're still seeing a lot of progress is on the leagues that aren't necessarily trying to be everything to everyone indefinitely.
I think we're seeing both more re-entrenchment, more regression in progress in some fronts of sports.
What's happening with trans athletes is a way in which sports can be a battleground.
And then on the flip side, we're seeing tremendous growth in women's sports leagues and really like unapologetic progressive ideology in women's sports leagues.
And so I think it is.
The interesting thing is that that kind of universality is gone.
The like, the leagues that want to be above or beyond politics and truly for everyone and whatever it is.
The Republicans buy shoes to kind of mentality.
That's what's gone.
I think what this example in Major League Baseball highlights is the fact that these cultural headwinds do change in response to the political party in power, and that the leagues that are trying to not get buffeted about are the ones that end up looking a little bit hypocritical.
Pride nights are business ventures in a way.
They are an attempt to tell a segment of the population that maybe doesn't think a ballpark is a welcoming place for them.
Like, no, buy tickets.
And this gets back to that issue of like it's hard to seem authentic in these social issues if you are reactive in the way you promote them.
Hannah, thanks so much.
Really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Alright, that's all we got for now.
Thank you so much for listening.
We'll be back on Wednesday with another episode.
I'll talk to you later.
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