"Keep It Baseball Related"

A roomful of Giants beat writers just did the accountability journalism the White House press corps keeps deciding it can’t.

For days after Pride Night, the San Francisco Giants mostly kept quiet. When the team finally made its president of baseball operations available to reporters, he kept quiet too, just at greater length.

Buster Posey, the former Giants catcher who now runs their baseball operations, started with a short statement. He understood there were “strong feelings on this topic.” He understood there were “differing perspectives.” And out of respect to everybody involved, he said, this was “not something that I’m going to revisit.” Then he opened the floor. Baseball questions only.

Reporters had other ideas.

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What followed went about how you’d expect from a man who’d decided ahead of time that the only safe subject was the infield. Someone asked about Pride Night. “I’ll answer baseball questions.” Someone asked again, coming at it from a different direction. “I’ll answer baseball questions.” One reporter asked him, flat out, why he’d take nothing but baseball questions when “there’s some very important matters that the public is debating outside this organization.” “I’m gonna answer baseball questions.”

He said some version of it around eight times. The reporters were probably aware that they weren’t going to break them, but I want to give them credit for trying and for being relentless about it.

My friend Darth put it on Bluesky better than I’m going to: “buster getting tougher questions from the local media than trump gets from the white house press corps.”

He’s right. And the more I think about it, the more that’s the actual story, not the caps. (Or, at least, it’s one of the stories.)