{"id":734326,"date":"2026-06-24T12:42:21","date_gmt":"2026-06-24T12:42:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/734326\/"},"modified":"2026-06-24T12:42:21","modified_gmt":"2026-06-24T12:42:21","slug":"sf-giants-news-manfred-issues-mlb-response-to-senate-inquiry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/734326\/","title":{"rendered":"SF Giants News: Manfred issues MLB response to senate inquiry"},"content":{"rendered":"

Good morning, baseball fans!<\/p>\n

First, a note that this was written before yesterday\u2019s \u201cpress conference,\u201d so it will not include information about that or responses to that. Stay tuned until tomorrow on that front, because I have a lot to say, but not enough time at the moment.<\/p>\n

Earlier this week, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley posted<\/a> a response that he received from Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred. Hawley had initially reached out to MLB complaining that it was unfair to force the players to wear Pride hats in the first place, after their initial response to the San Francisco Giants pitchers who defaced theirs in the June 12th Pride Night game.<\/p>\n

Manfred clearly didn\u2019t want the full force of the United States Department of Justice<\/a> to come down on MLB, so his response throws the Giants organization under the bus entirely, and probably unfairly. I\u2019ll pull the most pertinent quote from Alex Simon\u2019s reporting<\/a> over at SFGate.<\/p>\n

\u201dUnfortunately, this year the Giants communication with players was inadequate and not clear. Some players apparently did not understand that they had the option to wear their normal uniform and elected to add messages to their hats bearing the pride logo as a result. The Giants players were allowed to wear the hats with the biblical references for the entire game. After the game had concluded, my office issued a routine oral warning about the uniform policy violation \u2014 unfortunately it was issued before we became aware of the Giants\u2019 lapse in communication. The players were never fined or disciplined, nor will they ever be.<\/p>\n

This reads as a load of blame-shifting garbage, in my opinion. It has been confirmed<\/a> that members of the organization (such as manager Tony Vitello) were aware of the players\u2019 plan to deface the hats well before the day of the game. So conversations were clearly had. Other players were well aware of their right to not wear the Pride uniforms at all if they didn\u2019t want to. Because they chose not to.<\/p>\n

While communication is clearly an issue within the organization, I don\u2019t think the problem is with the team not letting the players know they weren\u2019t required to wear the uniforms.<\/p>\n

Also, and I cannot stress this enough, the players are grown adults with the ability to read their contracts and ask their teammates, coaches or organizational staff for clarification if they\u2019re unsure about something. This reads as further infantilization of the players involved. See, they\u2019re just wittle babies and no one told them they didn\u2019t have to wear the uniforms!<\/p>\n

If we decide to be generous and assume that any of this excuse is true, then that\u2019s even more damning for the organization as a whole. Because what do you mean Vitello was aware of the protest and didn\u2019t bother to inform the players involved that they didn\u2019t have to wear them in the first place? Did he not know? And if so, why did he not bother to check?<\/p>\n

This feels very much like an attempt by MLB to throw the Giants organization under the bus while also trying to state that the matter is now closed. It is absolutely not, but that is our update for today.<\/p>\n

What time do the Giants play today?<\/p>\n

The Giants continue this three-game series against the Athletics tonight at 6:45 p.m. PT.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Good morning, baseball fans! First, a note that this was written before yesterday\u2019s \u201cpress conference,\u201d so it will…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":734327,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2408],"tags":[5,162,4,378,66,81403,4343,4340,4344,4341,4342],"class_list":["post-734326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco-giants","tag-baseball","tag-giants","tag-mlb","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-giants","tag-san-francisco-giants-discussion","tag-sanfrancisco","tag-sanfranciscogiants","tag-sf","tag-sf-giants","tag-sfgiants"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116805143365506027","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/734326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=734326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/734326\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/734327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=734326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=734326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=734326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}