When the baseball club that Gabe Kapler leads, the San Francisco Giants, began their three-game series against the Cincinnati Reds on Friday night, Kapler took the opportunity to observe his own personal moment of reflection. His moment did not come when he was standing at attention at the edge of the dugout or before the playing of the national anthem.
As a consequence of this, Kapler would later explain to reporters in Cincinnati that he had no plans to stand on the field for pregame performances of the national anthem “until I feel better about the path our country is heading in.” Although Kapler acknowledged that he did not necessarily anticipate that his protest would “move the needle,” he said that he felt passionately enough to take this action.
Due to the terrible weather that had caused the game to be postponed for just over two hours, there were just seven New York Giants on the field when the national anthem was performed on Friday. This included two coaches, four players, and an athletic trainer. In the end, the Giants were defeated by a score of 5-1.
In this regard, he is comparable to another prominent sports person from the Bay Area who also grappled with the question of how to make their protest the most effective. Colin Kaepernick, a quarterback who once played for the San Francisco 49ers, also had a tough time. As a means of protest against racial inequity and police brutality, he began by sitting during the national anthem. However, after speaking with Nate Boyer, a retired Army Green Beret and a former National Football League player, he began kneeling instead.
That protest turned out to have repercussions that would continue for Kaepernick for a long time. After the conclusion of the 2016 season, he used his right to opt out of his contract, but despite the fact that he had previously guided his team to a spot in the Super Bowl, he was not signed. Since then, he has been provided with the opportunity to try out for teams only seldom. In 2019, he and his former teammate Eric Reid reached a settlement in a lawsuit that they had filed against the National Football League. In the complaint, they had alleged that the clubs in the league had conspired against them.
Before this week’s game between the Mets and the Giants, Kapler wrote in his journal about the emotional roller coaster he experienced before the game: “My head screamed drop to a knee; my body didn’t listen.” “I had every intention of walking back inside; yet, I froze. I had the feeling of being a coward. I didn’t want to draw unnecessary attention to myself, so I kept quiet. I didn’t want to cause the relatives of the victims or the victims themselves any further stress. In addition to the lights and spectacle, there was a baseball game and a rock band. I was well aware that thousands of individuals were utilising this game as a means of temporarily distancing themselves from the calamities of the real world. I was aware that tens of thousands more people wouldn’t comprehend the gesture and would consider it to be an insult to the military, to veterans, and to themselves.
The move taken by Kapler is the latest in a string of protests that have come from the world of sports this week. Prior to the game in the Western Conference finals that his team was scheduled to play on Tuesday, the head coach of the Golden State Warriors, Steve Kerr, passionately advocated for stricter gun regulation. Instead of posting anything about the game between the two rival clubs on their respective Twitter and Instagram pages on Thursday, both the Yankees and the Tampa Bay Rays chose to publish facts and statistics on gun violence instead.
He said in his writing, “But we weren’t given boldness, and we aren’t free.” “The officers who responded to the call placed a woman in arrest despite her pleading with them to enter the building and rescue her children. They prevented parents from organising a charge to stop the gunman and one of those parents was a father who found out his daughter had been killed while he was arguing with the police about something else. When politicians decide that the interests of lobbyists and the gun industry are more important than allowing our children the right to attend school without having to carry bulletproof backpacks and participate in active shooter exercises, we are no longer free.
