A little over a decade ago, a team of San Francisco union leaders and politicians sat across the table from an opposing squad of real-estate developers, exchanging pitches on a home run of a proposal to sprout an entire Mission Bay neighborhood out of the asphalt.
But these were no ordinary developers. They also ran a successful side business: a Major League Baseball team, and not a bad one at that. In fact, that team, the San Francisco Giants, was fresh off its third World Series title in five years. The labor and political leaders sitting across from the Giants brass couldn’t help but notice the team execs were wearing their World Series rings.
If you’ve never seen a World Series ring, they are not subtle. You could slip it off and use it as a throwing weapon, as soldiers in World War II movies do with their helmets.
“Everybody remarked on their rings,” recalled Mike Casey, then, as now, the president of the San Francisco Labor Council. “They wore them all the time.”
So, prior to a subsequent meeting, Casey spent a few bucks at a corner store and bought everyone on his side some Ring Pops. They flashed the gaudy sucking candies in front of the Giants executives; Casey recalls saying something along the lines of “Hey, we got rings, too.”
Some of the execs laughed, Casey recalls. Some didn’t. Either way, a deal was struck. The first phase of the Mission Rock development is now complete; hundreds of housing units and an entire office building for Visa have been created.
The Giants agreed to a high rate of affordability (albeit one in which both the math and the term “affordable” were malleable) and got the buy-in from labor. The baseball team/major developer came through in the clutch. Sometimes that happens on the ballfield and sometimes it doesn’t, but the Giants usually manage to get what they need in this city, through both political discipline and the simple advantage of being the San Francisco Giants.
This, however, is a difficult year.
A 2026 Giants season marked by underperforming high-priced acquisitions, flaccid bats and a cavalcade of late-game bullpen meltdowns veered into strange and terrible territory this month. During Pride Night on June 12, three pitchers penned a biblical verse on the team’s rainbow-themed Pride cap which is often trotted out by right-wingers as a “reclamation” of the LGBTQ+ rainbow. A fourth pitcher simply opted to wear his regular hat.
On the national level, culture warriors quickly began targeting Major League Baseball for allegedly discriminating against the players’ religious beliefs. MLB, in turn, threw the Giants under the bus: The league commissioner stated that the team failed to adequately communicate to its players that none of them is required to wear special-issue Pride gear. As for writing on your uniform, no extracurricular messages are permitted, be they biblical verses or civil rights slogans.
What a concatenation of errors for the home team: It’s hard to imagine we’d still be talking about this matter on the cusp of July if all four players had just passively worn their regular caps. The proactive nature of putting a biblical verse on a rainbow cap — perceived as a gratuitous poke in the eye by much of the team’s San Francisco fan base — feels far more insulting.
So the team — still underperforming, still only occasionally watchable — finds itself squarely in the crosshairs of both incensed left-leaning locals and national right-wing trolls and culture warriors, with no clear answer on how to please everyone, let alone anyone. The team’s milquetoast response to peeved fans has been wanting. The fact that this is still a story nearly three weeks on is a master class on how not to do disaster communications management.
What sporting analogy works best? Is it multiple errors committed on one play? Ruben Rivera’s worst base-running in the history of the game? Or is it beaning a player during batting practice — a grievous and entirely self-inflicted wound? Pick a winner: It continues to be a difficult year.
The San Francisco Giants are, of course, more than a baseball team. They’re a developer and a big San Francisco business, so it’s not surprising to find the team and its executives enmeshed in pro-Downtown, pro-business booster groups. Since 1998, the team has put $4.2 million into local political races. But, here’s the thing: 93 percent of that money — $3.9 million — went to Prop. D of 2015, in which 74 percent of city voters approved the team’s plans to create the Mission Rock development.
Since that time, the team has kept a low profile politically, and that’s by design. Its donations have been sparse, and have largely gone to consensus measures like schools and seawalls and earthquake safety, topping out at $25,000 a pop. Unlike the dearly departed San Francisco 49ers, the Giants do not overtly butt heads with San Francisco City Hall, let alone attempt to control local politics via throwing fantastic sums at political supplicants as the Santa Clara-based football team has done.
The Giants invest their money and clout in community endeavors that help some of the city’s most put-upon residents (including the team and Major League Baseball putting $1 million toward the Boys & Girls Club’s Willie Mays Clubhouse in Hunters Point). The Giants are also a longtime donor to the Alice B. Toklas LGBTQ Democratic Club Pride Breakfast (the team gave a “Silver”-level $2,000 donation this year).
It’s useful to have groups like this show up at meetings for you, and it’d be naive to say this is wholly altruistic — but it’d be a bit cynical to say that it’s wholly self-concerned.
Local politicos do not describe the Giants as having a Willie Mays-level of political know-how, but nobody would describe them as Johnnie LeMaster, either. They have smart executives and hire smart people on to do business and development. Try to think of all the coaches and front-office personnel who’ve come and gone in the last few decades on the team’s baseball side — it’s a lot. But the team’s core leadership has remained relatively intact.
The Giants know they can succeed off the field by avoiding the city’s notoriously toxic partisan politics and by, simply, being the Giants. The team’s Opening Day party is the rare all-political-denominations festival of joy. “I don’t care who you are as a public official, it’s exciting to be around pro sports,” says a longtime city politico. “Most developers don’t have a Major League Baseball team that’s exciting to see.”
Most developers don’t wear World Series bling to contentious negotiations, either. This rankled the Ring Pop crew, and they’re not alone: High-level San Francisco officials resent that the Giants don’t give lavishly to politicians or political causes as many developers do to ingratiate themselves. But they don’t have to: They’re the Giants. Sorry, the eight-time World Champion San Francisco Giants.
So that’s why it’s damaging to the team’s off-field leaders, who want to build buildings and do business deals, to find themselves blindsided by on-field debacles like the Pride Night fiasco. That’s why it’s damaging when the team’s Republican megadonor owner Charles Johnson puts millions of dollars behind national right-wing candidates and causes. That’s why it’s damaging when the team sells a partial stake to the brother of Jared Kushner.
World Series rings are weighty. But when it comes to making friends and influencing people on the San Francisco political scene, these sorts of activities serve as an unhelpful counterbalance. It’s hard to think of a team that has, in recent memory, done more to antagonize its supporters.
It feels impossible for the Giants to squander the reserves of goodwill they have in this city, political and otherwise. But it seems they’re hell-bent on trying.
“I do think they’re gonna have trouble,” says former mayor Willie Brown. “Politically, as a developer, you always have trouble unless you clearly evidence a beneficial interest with the authorities who are authorizing the development.”
Wearing World Series rings to a high-level meeting may have irritated the city’s political class. But what if the team’s attitude were to begin grating on the population writ large? What if We’re the Giants! no longer carried the cachet it presently does? If that day ever comes, the organization’s entire San Francisco political M.O. would need to be rebuilt. As baseball fans know, rebuilding is slow and painful and difficult.
What would problems for the Giants even look like? It’s hard to say. They could start on the micro level: LGBTQ+ San Franciscans buy tickets and jerseys and hats like everyone else. They are sprinkled throughout the paying crowd at the ballgames — and throughout the city government the Giants work with as business partners. It’d be so much better for the Giants if the first thought on everyone’s mind at a meeting with city officials was What a game last night! rather than Everything’s a travesty with you, man!
The Giants are, presently, in the midst of negotiations with the 800-odd unionized vendors who work concessions at the stadium. If those talks stall and labor starts making threats about walking off the job, do you think city officials will think it’s a better play to side with the team — or its workers?
There is, finally, one last thing the Giants could certainly do to cheer everyone up that they aren’t doing much of right now.
“They should have enough pride to try to produce a team the city could embrace and be proud of,” says Brown. “That’s not presently the case.”
In other words, to borrow the phrase of a different Bay Area sports owner: “Just win, baby!”
