Baseball has a bit of a Pride Month problem, and the outcome is going to be fascinating to watch.
If you’re not much of a sports fan, you might not know that nearly every major pro sports team in North America celebrates a “Pride Night” to celebrate LGBT people at some point during their seasons. These events often include special rainbow uniforms or hats, some worn in-game and others just for warmups.
As Major League Baseball is the only one in season during June, they take full advantage of the “opportunity.” The Texas Rangers are currently the only team out of 30 who do not have a Pride Night of some kind.
The controversy
During their Pride Night on June 12, the San Francisco Giants donned caps with the ever-expanding rainbow flag in place of the usual orange of the interlinked SF logo. That’s when four of their pitchers decided to take a stand.
One of them stuck with the traditional hat rather than wearing the Pride version. The other three wore the Pride cap, but wrote “Genesis 9:12-16” right next to the logo. This, of course, points to God’s promise of the rainbow following the flood.
Starting pitcher Landon Roupp explained the decision by saying,
"It's just about God's covenant and a promise that he makes to us that, you know, his faithfulness and his mercy. That's just kind of something I believe in, and I stand firm in that, and I'm thankful we live in a country where, you know, we have the freedom to believe what we want ... and express what we want."
The three followed the example of now-retired Dodgers superstar Clayton Kershaw, who wrote the verse reference on his hat for his team’s Pride Night in 2025.
While Kershaw escaped any response from the league last year, the Giants quartet did not. The league warned them that writing on the uniform is not permitted, though they insisted it was not about the tar content of the message.
Perhaps thanks to the Giants pitchers’ boldness, a smaller league faces an even bigger protest. The York Revolution, a team in the independent but MLB-affiliated Atlantic League of Professional Baseball, had to forfeit their game on Thursday, June 18 as several players refused to wear the scheduled Pride Night jerseys.
And, it’s not just a baseball issue. A few years ago, the NHL limited their participation in themed nights due to player protests of rainbow uniforms, though most teams eventually brought a Pride Night back in some way.
Lessons from the MLB’s Pride problem
It’s much too early to tell what will come of this, but it does feel like the start of something rather than a one-off. While we wait and see, there are a few lessons we can take in the meantime.
Somebody is going to win
Those who hate God will not leave us alone. “Coexistence” and “tolerance” were lies meant to get us to stand down until they got enough cultural sway to enforce their views.
Therefore, our aim can’t be just to get them to stop walking over us. We have to normalize Christian morality. That does not mean we force everybody to believe what we believe, but it does mean we need to get back to a place where the Bible is the default operating system.
Our loss isn’t inevitable
For a long time it sure felt like we were just going to have to come to terms with living in a world that drove further and further into degeneracy with no looking back. Now we have plenty of reason to believe that we have more reason for hope than we think.
We can absolutely make strides in influencing the world. Even the smallest bit of pushback causes an uproar, which shows just how fragile the opposition is.
Sometimes hope comes from the darkest places
It probably didn’t escape your notice that this took place in San Francisco, essentially America’s answer to Sodom and Gomorrah. Last year’s protest by Kershaw occurred in Los Angeles, a city right on San Francisco’s heels when it comes to debauchery. That in itself is worth pondering.
Sometimes the Christians living in such areas have a much greater sense of the darkness around us and therefore feel a stronger impulse to stand up to it. Those of us in the Bible Belt can be guilty of passivity as we assure ourselves “things are way better here,” while the Atlanta Braves and Nashville Predators don their rainbow jerseys.
Let’s learn from our friends and brothers in more Godless places and start taking stands before things get worse.
Just take a stand
So many things like this would not have happened if Christians had taken a stand. As I’ve argued before, the only reason we have youth sports on Sundays is because all the churchgoing families didn’t put their feet down. The same is true with the Pride Night problem.
The American pro sports leagues are packed with players who point to heaven when they score a touchdown or throw a strikeout, who kneel for a postgame prayer, and who have Bible verses in their Instagram bios. If even 20% of them had looked at the first rainbow jersey they were handed and said “That’s not happening,” then it wouldn’t have happened.
The same point applies to anyone who was told to put pronouns in their email signature or call a man “her.” One or two people saying no might be enough to embolden others to stand up, too.
Yes, the players would have been called bigots. Others may be fired. Jesus said the world was going to hate His disciples. Sometimes you stand up and people join you. Other times you stand alone and get thrown into the furnace. In either case, God is with those who do His will.
Someone might counter that all of this is easy for a preacher to say from a pulpit, where he won’t get fired for taking a stand against the LGBT agenda, or for me to say as I work for a Christian publishing company. That’s true to some degree.
However, I’ve been putting feelers out for secular work to make sure my family is financially secure, while knowing full well that there are about a half dozen articles on this easily-found site that make me not just unemployable but untouchable to most corporations. Oh well. The Lord will provide.
One other stand worth considering…
Maybe Pride Nights should have been our line in the sand as sports fans. Plenty of people boycotted the NFL for a time over the kneeling for the anthem controversy. Isn’t this worse?
I’m not all the way to a boycott yet, but maybe I should be. Though I’d never dare set foot in an arena or stadium on Pride Night, the money from the next game goes into the same people’s pockets. Maybe it shouldn’t be our money.
Praying time
I really do think we might be on the brink of an LGBT rollback that was unthinkable as little as two years ago. It would be a tremendous good for our society if LGBT causes stopped receiving the red carpet treatment. This momentum is an encouraging sign in that direction, and we should pray it continues.
Notes
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