Woke is Striking Out—Even in San Francisco

The “Vibe Shift” that became evident with Trump’s 2024 election hasn’t permeated all the institutions. DEI and LGBTQ+ are still operating (sometimes furtively) in universities, in blue states, and in corporate boardrooms and HR departments despite the best efforts of the Department of Justice.

Yet, despite the left-wing “Resistance” wielding some influence, the Shift is still happening. A recent baseball game in San Francisco, of all places, demonstrated that Americans are tiring of “progressive” attempts to make Americans bow before the left’s ideological idols. The cultural power to hit Americans with demands to surrender their beliefs is weakening. Woke is striking out.

On Friday, June 12, the San Francisco Giants game against the Chicago Cubs was designated “Pride Night.” Giants players were instructed to wear a special cap with the “SF” logo embroidered in rainbow colors instead of the usual orange.

Left-handed pitcher Sam Hentges simply refused to wear the specialty cap and put on his usual headgear for the game. But he didn’t draw as much attention as a few of his teammates did.

Landen Roupp, the starting pitcher, and relievers J.T. Brubaker and Ryan Walker wore the rainbow cap but inscribed Bible verses on them. Roupp and Walker wrote “Gen. 9:12-16” on theirs, while Brubaker penned “Genesis 9:13-15” on his.

The inscription sent a clear message that, if the players were going to wear a rainbow symbol on their clothing, people should know that the rainbow means something different to them.

Genesis 9:12-16 is the conclusion of the story of Noah’s ark. In it, God tells Noah that the rainbow will be the sign of the covenant between God and the entire world. Verse 14 reads, “When I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow is seen in the clouds,I will remember my covenant which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.”

This isn’t the first time that big leaguers have refused to don LGBTQ+ symbols that conflict with their beliefs about gender and sexuality. In 2025, Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw had a Genesis-inscribed hat on for that year’s Pride Night. And earlier last week, Jake Treinen, another Dodgers pitcher, wore his regular hat for the 2026 Pride Night game.

Yet, for some reason, the actions of the Giants players seem to have drawn the ire of the left. It’s probably partially because they did it in the heart of uber-liberal San Francisco.

But another cause for the left’s outrage is likely that it wasn’t just a single player resisting; it was four players presenting a united front against the woke bullies. Liberals like to pretend that any resistance to their ideological or policy positions is simply that of isolated cranks. Once people start banding together to say “No,” however, the left must spring into action to demonize them.

That task fell to Grant Brisbee of The Athletic, the sports journalism arm of The New York Times. Like the now-defunct ESPN the Magazine, which I have described elsewhere as “The Nation in Under Armour,” The Athletic goes heavy on the politics and light on the runs batted in. That blatant left-wing political bent was on full display again in Brisbee’s attack on the Giants players.

In his article titled “Giants pitchers’ Bible verses on Pride Night caps show how they’ve missed the point,” Brisbee claimed the Giants players made a “tone-deaf response to what should have been a moment for community unity.” For Brisbee, refusing to wear the Pride caps was an intentional effort on the part of the players to make the night about “us versus them.”

Brisbee’s long rant was about how “LGBTQIA+” (yes, he’s still doing all the letters) individuals are prone to being told they are “without value.” They are “likelier to be abused, to self-harm, to get kicked out of their homes, to be bullied, to be assaulted” because “society” doesn’t “accept them,” he wrote.

For Brisbee, the refusal to wear the symbol of an ideology that does not fit with common sense or biblical teachings amounts to “missing the point.”

What the Giants players did was to make Pride Night “about something else,” Brisbee pouted. He wasn’t sure if the players were making it about “yourself, say, or the idea that some people aren’t as worthy of recognition or support,” but he knew that they were indeed the bad guys.

If you want to read prose full of bland clichés and gross dishonesty, you can do no better than Brisbee’s article. “Dig deeper, my dude,” intones the sportswriter, “Dig a lot deeper,” with yet another implication that the players are “against” somebody. He ends with even more of the sloganeering of the High Woke period: “Do better. That’s the only thing we’re all supposed to do around here, anyway. Do better.”

Here’s the problem: Americans aren’t buying the kind of guilt trip Brisbee is selling anymore. Just because someone does not agree with some people’s sexual behavior or confusion about their gender doesn’t mean he or she is “against” them.

In fact, the people who have the most genuine compassion for the adherents of LGBTQ+ ideology are those who oppose it because they understand how damaging it is. It is those who seek to protect children from life-altering transgender surgeries and drug regimens and those who “affirm” the reality of biological sex who show the truest “support” for individuals who identify as LGBTQ+.

The attempt to claim that anyone who doesn’t submit to the left’s secular religion is refusing “unity” or “community” is a crock. The woke mob are the ones trying to bully people and exclude them simply for having a differing opinion. They operate from the spurious basis that Americans who don’t agree with the “LGBTQIA+” philosophy are people who deny other people’s human dignity, that they are motivated by “hate.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Giants players threw the woke establishment a curveball. Now, that establishment is throwing tantrums and yelling that the players hate them—and, implicitly, that they should be exiled from the society that the wokesters are still claiming to rule over.

Major League Baseball (MLB) itself responded to the actions with a warning to the players who wrote on their hats about affixing any kind of “nicknames or messages on apparel or playing equipment.” While MLB attempted to say this was a content-neutral rule, most people aren’t buying it.

Senator Josh Hawley wrote to MLB, pointing out that the league in 2020 put up political slogans everywhere, creating patches to be sewn on uniforms that read “Black Lives Matter” and “United For Change.” Not only that, but the league “suspended its own equipment rules so that players could display progressive political slogans on their cleats.”

Hawley made an oblique reference to another scandal of discrimination against Trevor Williams of the Washington Nationals. In a hidden camera investigation, the team’s Director of Community Relations boasted about discriminating against the “super Christian-Catholic” pitcher in terms of social media promotion. Even worse, the employee said that someone in the Nationals operation searches fans’ Google histories.

Sorry, “my dudes.” MLB and the woke journalists need to know that this phase of American history is over. Hawley is demanding answers. Other officials are more concrete about what they will do. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier posted on X: “Do you practice religious discrimination in Florida, @MLB? You’ll be hearing from my office soon.”

Americans will no longer cower and kowtow to people who want to ridicule, bully, “cancel,” and ultimately exclude them in the name of “inclusion.” They have already struck out.

David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.