One San Francisco Giants pitcher refused to bend the knee to the Black Lives Matter movement prior to the team’s opening day game against the Los Angeles Dodgers on Friday, citing the movement’s Marxist connections and his Christian convictions that prevent him from kneeling for man.
Relief pitcher Sean Coonrad stood as every one of his teammates and every player on the Dodgers kneeled before the National Anthem. Coonrad explained how he couldn’t kneel for the political gesture after the game.
“I’m a Christian, like I said, and I just can’t get on board with a couple of things that I have read about Black Lives Matter. How they lean towards Marxism and they’ve said some negative things about the nuclear family,” Coonrod said, according to NBC Sports Bay Area. “I just can’t get on board with that.”
Giants manager Gabe Kapler admitted that it was Coonrad’s choice not to kneel when speaking about the National Anthem protest after the game.
“The one thing that we said is we were going to let people express themselves,” said Kapler. “We were going to give them the choice on whether they were going to stand, kneel, or do something else. That was a personal decision for [Coonrad].”
Entire rosters of Major League Baseball teams have been kneeling in submission to the Black Lives Matter movement, with every member of the Washington Nationals and New York Yankees kneeling for the movement before their game on Thursday.
Baseball’s fanbase trends more conservative than other major sports leagues such as the NFL and the NBA, suggesting that the league could recieve a backlash from fans from the display of political propaganda.