What the Mariners’ Pride Video Gets Right
This week, The Mariners organization put out a video titled “Baseball is For Everyone: Mariners Celebrate Pride Month.” I was expecting it to be some cheesy video of a diverse crowd having fun at T-Mobile Park, a glorified commercial aiming to get the gay audience to show up on Pride Night. Instead, what the Mariners made was a thoughtful video that leaned far away from flash.
After seeing what the corporatization of Pride looked like, and what it looked like when corporations began to turn their back on Pride, I’ve felt very mixed about how companies interact with the queer community. It’s hard not to feel like companies are using rainbow branding to make a quick buck while being ready to drop their “support” the moment they get any blowback for it. But I was pleasantly surprised by the effort and thought put into the Mariners’ video.
In the short video, we see someone pick up a baseball and begin to cut and remove its red threads. On the screen, white text (which is a little hard to read) appears saying, “Thread does more than hold a baseball together, each small stitch can impact its journey through the air. For baseball’s LGBTQ+ fans, players, and communities, small milestones can make a big impact too.” The hands then pick up a length of rainbow colored thread and begin to stitch the ball back together, pointing out the queer milestones that baseball has passed (like the inclusion of Pride Night) and how “every action pulls our communities closer together.”
The restitching of the baseball is an interesting visual as well as an apt metaphor. It’s also a surprise, to see a company address forward movement as bringing us together, as we are in a time when many politicians and companies consider addressing queer issues and queer people to be divisive. The video frames queer issues as our issues, as part of a better future for all.
I was also surprised to see the video address the fact that while there have been out players in the minor leagues and in front offices, there’s not been a fully out active LGBTQ+ player in MLB (though you could make an argument for Glenn Burke). In times like these, I think the Mariners are making a stand when they address the idea of a gay major leaguer coming out as an important milestone for the baseball community. To speak of it as an inevitable part of progress and as a central part of a better future is even more moving.
What the video does right is that it doesn’t try to sell anything, not the rainbow baseball, not a Pride jersey. The point of the video is the message, and the message is one of celebration of differences but also of acknowledgment of the work to be done and the gap between where we are and where we’d like to be.
As a queer baseball fan, I have come to terms with the fact that the sport does not have much space for that part of my life. While I do go the Angels’ Pride Night, the Pride aspect of the evening is virtually invisible at the actual game. I harbor no illusions about what Arte Moreno thinks about queer people and what MLB thinks about queer people. But to see a team go out of their way to take a stand in a year when companies are pulling back from supporting queer issues is incredibly heartening. Instead of being on the defense from any potential blowback, the Mariners organization has taken a stand in hopes for a better future. I only wish that my own team would do the same.
An interview with cartoonist Ellen Lindner