The San Francisco Giants are a rotten, poisoned, blighted organization. I offer to the jury, by way of evidence, the following exhibit: Monday evening, a representative of the Giants saw a story from the San Francisco Chronicle about fans who still feel hurt and angry over the mess the organization made of its annual Pride Night celebration, and the front office's tepid, quarter-hearted, wildly inadequate response to public outcry. That team representative then logged onto social media so that they could blame the continuing controversy on online discourse and clickbait reporting. That representative, hilariously, was the team's chaplain, a man named Christian Huang.
The story Huang was commenting on was published Monday, and it begins with an anecdote about a longtime Giants fan who attended the home game on June 12, had a great time, and then learned after the fact about the Giants pitchers who'd made a spectacle of themselves by scrawling Bible passages onto their Pride Night hats in an act of protest. The fan, who identifies as queer, was hurt by what they described as players on the team using their uniform and platform as an opportunity to "tell me you hate me." The fan has joined up with others to express this hurt, by writing to the team and also by participating in protest actions.
What Huang took away from this story is not that the Giants biffed Pride Night, that the organization is due for some soul-searching, that its response to the hurt feelings of its fans has been inadequate and embarrassing, and that there is an opportunity to get this right by having someone from the team make a public effort at taking the matter seriously. Huang's big takeaway is, in fact, that Pride Night was a rousing success, and that media shit-stirring is the only reason that people are now worked up about it. In comments made under the Chronicle's Instagram post, Huang is just innocently recapping their reporting, as if to provide a helpful TL;DR for busy readers. "To recap, Sarah was not upset until the media's firestorm caused her to be upset," he wrote in a comment. Down the thread, in response to pushback from a member of the distressingly small minority of commenters who did not just dump out rank bigotry, Huang continued: "Sarah was not upset until she went online. The experience was great until then. I'm only recapping the Instagram caption."
Huang's since-deleted comments are stupid and disingenuous, so much so that engaging with them does him the huge favor of pretending that there is an active brain behind them. Alas: The protesting Giants pitchers wanted attention for their actions, otherwise they would have scrawled the Bible passages inside their hats. Long before there was social media and the internet, there was a little thing called the press, and newspapers, and at no point in U.S. history would these players' actions have gone unnoticed. You do not need to hear with your own ears a person denouncing your right to exist in order to be hurt and offended by it.
Huang was asked by a bewildered Instagram user whether he'd actually read the Chronicle's reporting, before stripping it of important details and repurposing it to deflect blame from the team. "I didn't," Huang admitted. "I don't have a paid subscription. I'm too cheap to buy it." He then continued to insist that Giants fans do not come by their hurt feelings honestly, but are being led astray by, I guess, their ability to read words and gather them into sentences.
"I'm just saying, Sarah seemed like she had a great time. There weren't people picketing or protesting or demanding she think a certain way. She enjoyed the night. Until she went online. Now there are people picketing, protesting and demanding people to think a certain way. It's quite paradoxical."
Defector reached out to Huang on social media and via his nonprofit community outreach organization, but has not received a response. The Giants have also not responded to an email to their media relations department. This post will be updated if we hear back.
Attitudes like Huang's are common. It's clear now that they pervade the Giants organization. This is, in fact, why Giants fans are upset. If the people atop the franchise were on the right side of this, it's reasonable to assume that Buster Posey would've shown a little bit less contempt in his only public remarks on the matter. It's reasonable also to assume that Roscoe Mapps, the team's chief diversity officer and the recipient of emailed thoughts from upset Giants fans, would not have tried to pass off a form letter as a personalized response, as reported by the Chronicle. It's even possible to believe that maybe the shit-headed Giants pitchers would've just shut the hell up and worn the stupid hats. A person in Huang's position—identifiable as a team representative on social media accounts also linked to his work in other realms—would probably not feel so comfortable spewing this lame-brained stuff where anyone could see it. It takes a toxic environment for so many people to behave so sloppily, to say nothing of the specific ugly ideas they're harboring.
H/t Jonathan
