“To be clear, this routine verbal warning not to wear the hat in future games is not disciplinary and had absolutely nothing to do with the content of the message. We respect players’ right to free expression. However, writing of any kind, with any message, is prohibited per Major League Baseball’s uniform regulations which provides in part that, ‘(a) player may not write, attach, affix, embroider or otherwise display nicknames or messages on apparel or playing equipment…’ “We have given the same warning numerous times in the past to players for messages such as ‘Dad,’ ‘Happy Mother’s Day, I Love Mom’ and names of family members.”
Right. The episode puts me in mind of my Dad’s favorite epitaph,
“Here lies the body of William Jay,
Who died maintaining his right of way.
He was right, dead right, as he sped along,
But he’s just as dead as if he were wrong.”
In other words, you can be technically correct but your insistence on getting your way can prove needlessly fatal anyway.
The Giants were the first professional sports team to host a game that raised awareness and money for the HIV/AIDS epidemic with “Until There’s a Cure Day” in 1994. The team then jumped on that slippery slope in 2021 when it became the first team to incorporate the rainbow symbol celebrating non-conformist sexual behavior on their on their caps for their annual Pride game.
Imposing political correctness on employees by forced political conformity and speech is legal (the Giants are not the government) but unethical. Personally, I would quit a job that made me do that, and in the past, I have refused directives to, for example, give to a charity my employer supported. Roupp, Brubaker and Walker, plus reliever Sam Hentges, who opted against wearing the Pride Night cap in the game, chose the perfect mode of protest. Break the rules, and make the game punish them for referencing the Bible. It’s a Cognitive Dissonance Scale masterpiece!
See, for most baseball fans, the Bible is high in positive territory. Punishment for quoting the Bible will always be in negative territory no matter what the reason. The players forced baseball to align itself with an unpopular position while they remain firmly in the plus- portion of the scale.
In my ethics seminars, I always discuss the act that is ethical but illegal: it is civil disobedience. You break the rule and suffer the consequence to make society aware of a bad law, in this case, sports pandering to specific interest groups and forcing its players to express support for something they may not want to support. That’s a First Amendment violation when the government does it. It’s just wrong when a company, organization or sports team does it.
Ethics Alarms 
the obvious analogy is Colin Kapernick.
is he an ethics hero for not standing during the national anthem?
is standing a form of compelled speech?
is it just that he whined about the fallout from his decision
is Kapernick’s case analogous or not?
-Jut
No. The National Anthem is part of all pro sports going back to the beginning, and participating with the team is a contractual obligation of each player. The Anthem is also routine, unifying tradition. Furthermore, the Kneeling stunt disrupted the game experience and made it political, which fans neither pay for nor expect. In addition, the entire Pride pandering is divisive per se. Unlike the kneeling stunt, not a single attendee of the game was made aware of the Bible verse. Even the front row can’t see the caps in that detail, so this, if you want to call it a protest, was non-disruptive and interfered with no aspect of the game experience at all.
Maybe, but is there a difference between insisting on courtesy and insisting on allegiance to a social issue?
I’d say there is. Showing respect for the anthem is part of the conduct package players know they’re entering into. Unless it’s specifically part of the contract, being human billboards is not. I’d be less sympathetic if they were race car drivers, but that’s not part of baseball culture.
This is equivalent to making people wear hats saying Christ is King or a MAGA hat. The left would be apoplectic.
“It is not an anti-homosexuality passage, but then any Bible reference on Pride Night might be seen as subversive.”
Particularly the verse in question which sought to reclaim the rainbow as a symbol of God’s promise to humanity never to destroy the Earth by water again.
And of course, we’re talking about San Francisco. The town that killed Thom Brenneman’s career.
I’m glad you and Fun (see below) explicated the verse.
True, the bible passage did not reference homosexuality, and it was about the rainbow being a symbol of faithful love.
However, the rainbow came after the flood which came after a wickedness was expressed by mankind and accumulated with no abating that we take to be figuratively described because we have such a stable world compared to pre-deluvian humanity. We don’t really understand how nasty things really were.
Any reference to the God of Christianity in this context is also a reference to judgment and thus to sin and thus to homosexuality and thus opposite of pleasant happy and good like the recent Hello Fresh advert wants us to think.
The gay lobby chose the rainbow for all of the excellent features of the rainbow that could be enumerated. The three players said hey the rainbow means this to us. The gay lobby shit out a bunch of baseballs because they act like they own the rainbow as a symbol and the three players just co-opted it, setting up a provocative cultural fight for ownership.
Rather than just letting people have a take on things and play ball together, having ball in common, the response to the players is effectively equivalent to the Uk and EU suppressing speech. In the end there will be a net loss for gay “pride”.
The bible verse was an excellent middle finger to the gay lobby for their forced speech approach to cultural change similar to the pictures we have of dogs and water cannon being unleashed on black people during the civil rights movement.
Great analysis. Thank you.
And for the appropriation of the rainbow for its own purposes. Fighting back against innocuous symbols being appropriated for group identity purposes is ethical. The okay gesture, the Gadsden flag and other traditional long-understood symbols have been under fire because of their alleged appropriation by far-right extremist groups. My argument is that we should not allow extremists to appropriate neutral symbols and gestures. That includes letting rainbows be coopted to only and always refer to the LGBT community.
And then there’s Jackie Robinson Day.
Can’t find fault with that. Baseball is properly celebrating its most significant contribution to American society and ethics by being the catalyst for the end of segregation nation wide. It’s as valid as the U>S. celebrating July 4th. Anyone who finds the “42” uniform display divisive has a serious problem.
There are times I wonder whether race relations and the condition of the black underclass are much better now than they were in the early ‘sixties.