© Kyle Terada | 2020 Aug 26
No justice, no baseball.
That was the message sent on Wednesday night when the Giants and Dodgers postponed their game at Oracle Park, in the wake of Jacob Blake being shot seven times in the back by Wisconsin police officers.
The postponement followed others across the sports world. After the decision was made, Giants President Farhan Zaidi joined Mark Willard on KNBR to discuss the decision, and specifically address the segment of the audience which asked: How does cancelling a baseball game help?
“There’s really two steps to this,” Zaidi said. “There’s an awareness side of this and it’s impacting me. I can speak personally, my heart wasn’t in being at the ballpark and playing a baseball game today, but I know we have a lot of fans that were looking forward to watching a game tonight. At some level that’s what a protest is. It’s impacting society operating as business as usual, maybe in a way that frustrates certain people, but sometimes that’s what it takes to affect change.
“Our role as a sports organization is we do have a public platform. There are certain issues that we collectively want to take a position to raise awareness of and the next step is reform, and that’s going to be an ongoing topic of conversation for us.”
The Giants will make the game up on Thursday with a double-header featuring two seven-inning contests. Zaidi reiterated that even though the teams will be back on the field, the postponed game cannot be where the Giants’ duty to further the cause of racial justice ends.
“We are going to be back on the field playing baseball again, and if this is an important cause for us it can’t be about going home tonight and coming back tomorrow as if nothing happened. We have to carry this message forward for what we do on the field and what we do in our community and that’s our priority for many of our players and many people in our organization as well.”
Listen to the full interview below.