Almost two weeks since Pride Night, the uproar over four San Francisco Giants pitchers protesting the team’s rainbow-themed hats — three by writing a Bible verse from the Book of Genesis, one by refusing to wear the hat at all — shows no sign of dying down. 

The loudest voices in the debate have one thing in common: None of them play in the majors. Out of 780 active MLB players across 30 teams, not one has publicly identified as LGBTQ+.

Much of the Giants’ fan base is outraged, and the fracas has since gone national. Harmeet Dhillon, the former chair of the San Francisco Republican Party and now the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the federal Department of Justice, is investigating the Giants, framing the four pitchers as conscientious objectors whose religious rights were violated. Comic — and San Francisco native — Rob Schneider offered to pay the fines of any player subject to disciplinary action, although none have been fined.

The episode has drawn comparisons to former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who knelt during the national anthem in 2016 to protest police brutality. Meanwhile, LGBTQ+ Christians have pushed back, questioning the assumption that homosexuality is inherently incompatible with faith. No one seems happy with the status quo. The Giants did not respond to a request for comment.

Putting aside the terms of the debate, one thing has been missing: a gay Major League Baseball player. The Giants almost had one. In 2019, Solomon Bates was an up-and-coming 22-year-old pitcher for the Richmond Flying Squirrels, the Double-A team in the Giants system, when he publicly disclosed (opens in new tab) his sexual orientation — only the second player in the minors to do so. 

Three days later, he was let go.

“They had a voice,” he said. “They just didn’t want that voice to speak up.” The timing of Bates’ termination spoke volumes, but he can’t prove it was related to his disclosure and declines to speculate. He believes his performance was not a factor, as he had a 3.74 ERA across two levels in 2022 and averaged 11.9 strikeouts per nine innings in his minor-league career.

It didn’t end there. Later, while playing in Mexico, he heard of a smear campaign to prevent other Major League Baseball teams from signing him. A scout for the New York Mets had labeled his mechanics as “too repeatable,” or so Bates was told. “But then I heard my name was being tarnished by affiliates saying my character was bad,” he added. He learned secondhand that there had been inquiries into how he might behave in the locker room.

In February 2023, another minor leaguer, Andrew Comas, came out as gay. But since then, nothing. In 2026, perhaps no arena of American public life remains as bereft of LGBTQ+ representation as professional sports. 

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Bates, who says he speaks with God every day, is dismayed that the Pride hat controversy originated in San Francisco, considering its outsize role in the movement. Athletes who don’t support gay rights shouldn’t play for the Giants, he said.

“A rainbow should not hurt your heart like that,” he added. “There are people who go to Pride Night, and they’re brought together by baseball.” Even still, if the Giants extended an offer for him to rejoin the organization, he would accept without hesitation. “Absolutely,” he said.

This isn’t the first time a club has caused an uproar through clumsy outreach to LGBTQ+ fans. In 2023, the Los Angeles Dodgers invited the local chapter of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the San Francisco-founded charity drag troupe, to their Pride Night. Pitcher Blake Treinen publicly objected, and a conservative backlash spurred the team to rescind the invite. But amid a backlash to the backlash, the Dodgers ended up re-inviting the Sisters.

Jason Keegan, a gay Giants fan who lives outside Los Angeles, notes the lingering animosity among some queer Dodgers fans three years later, as well as the ugliness of the present moment. “Do I care if a player doesn’t want to wear a hat? No. Do I care about them trying to shove a Bible verse down my throat at a ballgame? Absolutely,” he said. “Imagine if it were a player writing something pro-ICE on their hat on Mexican Heritage Night.”

If anything, the Giants appear to be backsliding from a position of support. In June 2021, when the pandemic forced the cancellation of San Francisco Pride’s annual parade for the second year, the organization and the team coproduced “Pride Night at Oracle Park,” two back-to-back evenings of socially distanced movie screenings in the stadium. That was the same year the Giants debuted their rainbow-colored jerseys, a first for Major League Baseball. I was SF Pride’s communications director at the time, and I found the team’s front office to be friendly, eager, and sincere. 

There was but one LGBTQ-identified staff member, and she has since moved on. Then as now, there were no gay players to join officers of SF Pride on the field in solidarity. To Suzanne Ford, a trans woman who was Pride’s treasurer and now serves as its executive director, the team’s silence on the Pride hat affair is deafening. She has spoken with representatives from the team who say they’re holding internal discussions but have not responded publicly.  

To Ford, the episode symbolizes the triumph of locker-room culture over hard-won social progress. “Everyone in our community knows what this signifies,” she said. “It’s getting clouded over with this veneer of religious freedom, but we all know what we’re fighting. All that toxic masculinity emanates from the locker room.” 

Bates offers a slightly different assessment. The locker room, he said, is “a brotherhood — but it depends on who is accepted into the brotherhood.”

Although he came out in 1982, three years after retiring, Oakland A’s outfielder Glenn Burke holds the distinction of being the league’s first openly gay player. (He’s also credited with inventing the high-five.) “They can’t ever say now that a gay man can’t play in the majors, because I’m a gay man, and I made it,” Burke said (opens in new tab) shortly before he died in 1995 of complications from AIDS.

Then there was Billy Bean, who came out in 1999, seven years after his retirement, and later served as the league’s ambassador for inclusion. This month, Dodger Stadium unveiled a joint memorial (opens in new tab) for Burke and Bean. Although it’s permanent and not merely a Pride Month display, it underscores an uncomfortable fact: Whether it’s official policy or merely a de facto situation, America’s pastime remains as hostile to LGBTQ+ athletes as it was in the 1970s.