Reflections on a game not yet played
Jacob Blake opened the door of his SUV and leaned in, so the police shot him in the back seven times in front of his children, which paralyzed him.
(stares at the screen for three hours)
…Yep.
Players in the NBA, and specifically Black players in the NBA, found themselves grappling with that statement very publicly, and the Milwaukee Bucks — Milwaukee is 40 miles from Kenosha, where the police shot Blake — were the first to decide not to play. Every other team on the schedule yesterday joined them, the NBA announced no one would be playing that day, and then a few baseball teams also joined the protest.
The Giants were, uh, how to put this…The Giants weren’t not among them. The team has been one of the most vocal supporters of black lives mattering in Major League Baseball, and they were among the six teams not playing yesterday in protest. If you put those two facts together, it might seem like you have a pretty good idea of what happened.
But those two tidbits aren’t as related as they seem. It was the Dodgers who made the first move in San Francisco, with Mookie Betts deciding he wouldn’t play yesterday no matter what, and the rest of the team backing him up (Dave Roberts had also decided he wouldn’t be part of the game, but either the team didn’t know yet or that wasn’t their red line). The Giants followed, and the game was postponed until today, to be made up as part of a doubleheader.
The most important Giants-related part of that is: The Giants followed. They were not the driving force behind the game’s postponement. They also, according to Henry Schulman, didn’t necessarily want to play:
But it seems fair to say that this decision came more from the Dodgers than from the Giants.
Again, this is not to say that every Giant wanted to play and was frustrated by the dang Dodgers taking a dang stand on civil rights. In addition to Schulman’s reporting above, the Dodgers went out of their way to say that was not the case:
But the reporters didn’t have access to any Giants players. Only Gabe Kapler took questions, and it would be nearly dereliction of duty for him to say, like, “Oh, yeah, Cueto and Longoria were all, ‘LET’S GET OUT THERE, FUCKOS, IF THEY’RE NOT PLAYING IT’S A FORFEIT.’ Meanwhile, Belt and Crawford, horrified by the way this country treats its Black citizens…”
No, from all accounts Kapler talked around the issue of who exactly said what and how the clubhouse dealt with the issue of sports dealing with the fact that Jacob Blake opened the door of his SUV and leaned in, so the police shot him in the back seven times in front of his children, which paralyzed him. There were conversations, we know. People expressed viewpoints, as is often the case in conversations. Beyond that, information is limited.
Farhan Zaidi got on KNBR a little later and gave a couple details about how some guys wanted to play and some didn’t:
(Their hearts weren’t in it, is how that last one ended in a follow up tweet)
There was a contingent of Giants players who wanted to play just because the team is on a roll right now. Forget the outside world, forget the chaos surrounding us, they thought, they wanted to play. They didn’t get what they wanted, and that’s a good thing. Wouldn’t this all feel pointless? Won’t it still feel kinda pointless when they play their doubleheader today?
The Giants, as a team, did the bare minimum to fulfill their obligations as people in the world right now. They did not use their opponent’s moral stand for their own benefit. They did not publicly speak out against the postponement in any way. They simply allowed it to happen, then exited the building. They didn’t put anything up on social media, and they didn’t talk to anyone. They were at the park, and then they weren’t.
Now, this isn’t full-throated criticism of the Giants, because there are teams who did not even do that. Matt Kemp of the Rockies and Jason Heyward of the Cubs both sat out the game, and their teams went on without them. Other teams played their games with no changes at all. Maybe the Giants got a B yesterday, but an awful lot of baseball was living the C- life.
But you don’t want your team to only do the right thing by default. You want them to be out in front, like they were with kneeling for the anthem. That wasn’t unanimous — even the pregame show of unanimity wasn’t unanimous, thanks to Sam Coonrod — but it sent a message that the Giants weren’t afraid to stand up (so to speak) for their beliefs.
Yesterday’s message was that if others stand up for their beliefs, the Giants would support them. That’s perfectly fine, but it feels like a step back. Some of that has to come back to the team not having any Black players on the active roster, and some of it is probably that the leaders in the Dodgers clubhouse were immediately compelled to take action in a way that the leaders in the Giants clubhouse either weren’t or couldn’t.
The Giants could be doing worse, but you have to look at them and wish they were doing a little better. That’s a metaphor for the baseball season. That’s a metaphor for California.
In the end, maybe all this is splitting hairs. The important thing is what’s going on in the country, not necessarily how strong a baseball team’s response was to it. And what’s going on is this: Jacob Blake opened the door of his SUV and leaned in, so the police shot him in the back seven times in front of his children, which paralyzed him.
How could you play baseball on a night like that?