Well, the San Francisco Giants' pitching staff isn't winning any fans in the Bay Area's very large LGBTQ+ community, and several of them used Friday night's Pride Night game to show a quiet act of protest over the team's annual gesture of inclusivity.

Probably emboldened by the second Trump administration, several pitchers on this year's Giants team decided to deface their Pride Night hats and write a Bible verse on them, in order to express their distaste and lack of support for the Giants' Pride Night game on Friday.

On starting pitcher Landen Roupp's cap, as you can see in the photo below, he wrote "Gen 9:12-16," which he and/or several other pitchers must have picked up from a right-wing website or Christian TikTok-er, because it's not the usual Leviticus verse that bigots have trotted out for decades to prove the Bible doesn't approve of same-sex coupling. Instead, it's a verse that references a rainbow, I guess to suggest that rainbows don't belong on LGBTQ peoples' flags?

The verse in question reads, "And God said, ‘This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind."

Roupp, responding to questions about whether LGBTQ fans might see the gesture as hateful, said, "There’s no hate at all. It’s just what I stand for and what I stand [on]. I believe in God, and yeah, that’s me."

He said of the rainbow Pride Night cap, "It’s just something that I feel like I was forced to support, when I don't morally support it."

Following suit with Roupp's gesture was reliever JT Brubaker, as seen below.

As the Chronicle's Ann Killion writes, "The San Francisco Giants have enough problems this season that you wouldn’t expect the players to actively try to alienate their fans... Yet some of the snowflakes on the Giants, the pitching staff specifically, decided to say a giant F-you to a good chunk of their fan base. On a night that was supposed to be about inclusion, they hijacked the event for their own purposes."

Killion notes that closer Ryan Walker, "who shouldn’t try to draw any more ire," scrawled the same Bible verse on his cap. And Sam Hentges boycotted the hat altogether, going on the field with his normal Giants cap.

Killion also quotes beloved veteran broadcaster Mike Krukow, who has a gay son and who reacted to the gesture thusly: "I think that you have the right as a player to believe and say whatever you want. But you have to take a broader look at the city you’re playing in. What makes San Francisco so great is the acceptance of others — ethnicities, opinions, cultures — and that extends to the gay community. I would just hope they would understand the demographic of San Francisco and respect people for who they are. What you do to your uniform, that has weight to it. You can offend people. And why would you do that?"

The players who defaced their hats apparently got some sort of notice from the league, and the Giants issued a statement saying, "We understand the choice by individual players has caused pain and anger to many in the LGBTQ+ community and we are sorry for that."

Fan Josh Jensen wrote in to the Chronicle, quoting a letter he sent to the team, saying that the pitchers "wanted to express their antagonistic and homophobic views while weaponizing their Christianity."

A fan named Heather from Oakland, commenting on the Chronicle's initial coverage of the pitchers' actions, writes, "It's an abomination. I used to be proud to be a Giants fan. They were an organization that always did things right. Thats no longer the case and Friday night made that abundantly clear."

And as another fan writes of the pitchers, "Bush league clowns, this organization is turning incresingly unlikeable."