Major League Baseball has warned three San Francisco Giants pitchers for writing Bible verses on their Pride Night caps, telling the players that they broke its uniform rules.
Starter Landen Roupp and relievers JT Brubaker and Ryan Walker each took the mound Friday in the team’s rainbow Pride cap with a passage from Genesis scrawled next to the logo. A fourth pitcher, Sam Hentges, didn’t wear the Pride cap at all. He went with the Giants’ regular hat.
MLB chief communications officer Pat Courtney said the writing violated league rules and that the players had been warned about doing it again, in a statement first reported by Outsports and confirmed to USA Today.
San Francisco Giants starting pitcher Landen Roupp throws against the Chicago Cubs during the first inning on Friday in San Francisco.
There is nothing unusual about the warning itself. Baseball’s uniform rules don’t let players add writing or illustrations to any part of the uniform, no matter what it says. The first time, you get a warning. A second offense and there is discipline. Cleveland pitcher Mike Clevinger got the same kind of warning in 2018 for wearing a pair of loud cleats.
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Roupp’s cap read “Gen 9:12-16.” Those are the Bible verses that state that God hangs a rainbow in the sky as the sign of his covenant after the flood. Lately those verses have become passages of choice for Christian athletes who want the rainbow back as a religious symbol instead of an LBGTQ one. Clayton Kershaw wrote the same lines on his Dodgers Pride cap last season.
Poupp didn’t hide from it after the game. The verse was about God’s covenant and his own faith, he told reporters, and there was no hate in it. When a reporter asked how he’d answer someone in the LGBTQ community who was hurt by it, he said he would tell them to read the Bible.
“There’s no hate at all,” Roupp said. “It’s just what I stand for.”
The Giants did not punish anyone. The club put out a few sentences saying it knew the players’ choices had caused pain and anger among LGBTQ fans and that it was sorry. A club can discipline a player for disrupting a team event if it wants.
Manager Tony Vitello said nobody talked to the pitchers about the caps beforehand. He called them individuals free to do what they think is best, then went out of his way to praise how the organization embraces the communities it celebrates on theme nights.
It is striking with a franchise that has leaned in for a long time. San Francisco threw the first HIV/AIDS awareness game in major pro sports: “Until There’s a Cure,” in 1994. It was the first team to stitch the rainbow into its on-field caps in 2021.
