MLB Warns Players Who Wrote Bible Verses on Their Hats During Pride Night

Scott Marshall/AP

Major League Baseball issued a warning to players after several of them wrote Bible verses on their hats during Pride Month celebrations.

The warnings stemmed from last Friday’s game between the San Francisco Giants and the Chicago Cubs. That night, the Giants held Pride Night at Oracle Park. To mark the occasion, players wore caps with a rainbow-colored Giants logo.

Some fans noticed that a few Giants players had something else on their hats. Pitchers Landen Roupp, JT Brubaker and Ryan Walker all wrote Bible verses from Genesis written near the rainbow logo.

“The rainbow is a symbol of God’s covenant to us,” Roupp said after the game. “Us, as believers, stand firm in that. But I don’t, I mean, it’s not anything– there’s no hate at all. It’s just what I stand for and what I stand in. I believe in God.”

Days after the controversy, Outsports obtained a statement from the MLB claiming the Bible verses violated uniform guidelines. The report read:

“The writing on the cap violates our rules and consistent with normal practice we have warned the players about future violations,” Pat Courtney, MLB’s chief communications officer, told Outsports in a statement.

On Friday, starting pitcher starting pitcher Landen Roupp and relievers JT Brubaker and Ryan Walker wore the rainbow Pride caps on Pride Night but wrote the Bible verse “Genesis 9:11-16” next to the rainbow “SF.” (Pitcher Sam Hentges did not wear the Pride cap, opting for the team’s normal hat.) The verse says that God promises to never flood the Earth and to demonstrate that, “I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the Earth.”

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