Three San Francisco Giants pitchers turned their Pride Night caps into a Bible billboard, and Major League Baseball wasn't OK with it. The league has warned Landen Roupp, JT Brubaker, and Ryan Walker after they wrote Scripture references on the team's rainbow-colored hats during Friday's game against the Chicago Cubs, per NBC Sports. "The writing on the cap violates our rules," MLB spokesperson Pat Courtney said in a statement, adding that the players were cautioned about "future violations," per the Athletic.
The caps were part of a team promotion "in celebration of Pride and the LGBTQIA+ community," per the Giants site, but Roupp told reporters that his inscription, Genesis 9:12-16, was about God's "covenant" and his own religious expression. Reliever Sam Hentges went a different route, skipping the Pride cap entirely in favor of the standard orange-and-black version. "I don't morally support it," Hentges said on Saturday, per the San Francisco Chronicle, though he added: "I don't hate the LGBTQ community. ... We have these hats and we're supposed to wear them if we support it. If we don't, then you don't have to wear them. We have that choice. Just like they have their choices, too."
"If I was a Giants fan, I would never attend a game again," Cyd Zeigler, founder of LGBTQ+ sports site Outsports, said in response, per KGO, calling the pitchers' move "disgraceful" and adding, "They defaced the Pride rainbow by telling the LGBTQ community they don't own the rainbow—God owns the rainbow." The Giants pitchers aren't the first to use Pride gear this way: Last season, then-Dodgers star Clayton Kershaw wrote the same Genesis reference on his Pride Night cap, per NBC. MLB hasn't announced any fines or suspensions tied to the warnings.
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