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With the San Francisco Giants still dealing with the aftermath of their Pride Night debacle, the team’s Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer Roscoe Mapps sent an email last week to some fans who objected to how the team handled the situation.
What these fans might not know is that Mapps is an out gay executive, having been with the team since 2015. He’s also been a driving force in the team adopting the rainbow Pride cap.
In 2021, the Giants became the first MLB team to wear rainbow-colored caps for Pride Night. A year later, Mapps stood beaming at home plate during Pride Night with the Los Angeles Dodgers, in which both teams wore rainbow-themed caps.
Now he’s among Giants executives who are dealing with fans angry about the team’s public mishandling of the June 12 Pride Night during which three Christian pitchers wrote a Bible verse on the Pride caps.
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Roscoe Mapps leads by example for the San Francisco Giants
Giants executive came into the job as an out man and is an Outsports Power 100 honoree.
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Giants fans send letters to the team and Roscoe Mapps
Much of the anger from Bay Area Giants fans, both LGBTQ and allies, has been about the team’s tepid response to what happened that night, with management either being tight-lipped or issuing what many see as PR statements that don’t address why the pitchers’ actions were so harmful.
Outsports has received dozens of letters from angry fans that we are publishing — some of them addressed directly to Mapps — from longtime fans and season-ticket holders who feel a sense of betrayal.
Mapps had publicly stayed out of management’s response until last week, when some fans received the email from him after they complained about how Pride Night was handled.
“Thank you for taking the time to write to me and share your experience,” Mapps wrote in the email. “I read your email, along with many thoughtful messages sent to me, and I wanted to respond to you directly.
“Messages like yours help us better understand the human impact of moments like this. They continue to inform important conversations and reinforce our commitment to strengthen the trust we’ve built over many years. Meaningful action doesn’t always happen as quickly as we’d like, but what you’ve shared is helping shape the work ahead.
“With much appreciation, Roscoe.”
“It is not an apology,” J.P., a gay Christian and longtime Giants fan, told Outsports. “It doesn’t acknowledge the team’s responsibility for what happened on Pride Night, nor does it spell out any specific, constructive actions being taken (or even being considered) to prevent something similar from happening again — either to the LGBTIA+ community — or to any other segment of the fan base.”
Fans on the Giants subReddit were equally unimpressed.
“Aggressively unsurprising,” wrote one. “It felt like it was just fed through a PR filter,” wrote another.
Outsports reached out to Mapps to comment on Pride Night and its aftermath and has not received a reply.
Who is Roscoe Mapps?
Mapps joined the Giants in 2015 after a career in politics and corporate recruiting, rising to his current role as chief diversity and inclusion officer.
His first job was as campaign manager for the team’s efforts to pass a voter initiative to allow the Giants to build a neighborhood development next to Oracle Park called Mission Rock.
It passed with 74% of the vote, cementing Mapps’ position in the organization.
When interviewing for the Giants job, the Texas native did not hide the fact that he was gay nor his work in LGBTQ advocacy, he told Outsports’ Ken Schultz in a 2023 interview.
“That’s part of my body of work — making sure that we are equal and seen and heard and have dignity,” said Mapps, a member of the Outsports Power 100 that year as one of the highest-ranking out men in American sports. He’s been on the Power 100 list every year.
When the Pride caps debuted in 2021, Mapps said it was rewarding to see what the gesture meant to many of his colleagues.
“Just by doing the work, you’re raising the level of cultural competency because people are starting to share their stories around this particular [LGBTQ] culture that you wouldn’t have had before,” he said.
Mapps was more expansive in 2021 about the power of the Pride caps in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle.
“I started getting messages from a variety of people, some officials, some friends in the community, some leaders, and even some colleagues internally who were saying, ‘This is phenomenal. I feel seen. This is incredible,’ which is what we were hoping for, you know?” Mapps said.
“I started getting chills in the middle of the meeting. …
“The thing that was really cool for me was, as somebody who’s queer, is that everybody was engaged in those conversations, whether I was there or not and everybody was kind of on the same page for why we wanted to do this, why now and why it was important. And there was never really a question about it. I think that that says a lot about our organization, but it also says a lot about how much the community has meant to us and has impacted us.”
The 2026 aftermath
The tradition had been non-controversial in the following four years, with no reported public player objections, including from some of the players who wrote Bible verses that ignited this year’s controversy.
Why they picked this year to make a statement is still unclear, though they have cited religious objections.
The furor from fans seemed to catch the team’s front office off guard, since no apology was ever given, with important figures like team President Buster Posey and CEO Larry Baer either refusing to comment or telling people to move on.
Until last week, Mapps had been silent, until he sent the email to some fans and why he finally got involved is unclear. Without him speaking publicly, his role in the team’s response will be unknown.
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