Three Teams, One Pattern
Three teams. Three different responses to the same month. All three got hammered for it.
It started June 6, when the Dodgers held their Pride Night. Reliever Blake Treinen didn’t write anything on his cap. He didn’t make a statement. He just wore the team’s regular cap instead, the only pitcher in his bullpen who did, and never explained why. It still became a national story, with outlets and strangers online arguing for days about a hat he never said a word about.
Six days later, June 12, the Giants held theirs. Starter Landen Roupp wrote “Gen 9:12-16” on his cap, the verse where God puts the rainbow in the sky as His sign of covenant after the flood, written right across the same rainbow logo every team wears that night. Two of his teammates did the same thing with their own verses. MLB’s response came fast: an official warning for a uniform rule violation, with the league careful to add that the warning “had absolutely nothing to do with the content of the message.”
And this week, June 18, the Texas Rangers, the only team in the league that’s never held a Pride Night at all, host a Faith and Family Night instead, the way they have for years. No cap, no statement, just a different theme on the schedule. It still draws a headline every June, including this one.
Sit with that for a second. One man subtracted something personal and got a week of scrutiny. Another group added something personal and got an official warning. An entire organization did neither, just chose a different night, and still can’t make it through June without becoming a talking point. Three different actions. Same result, every time.
The Question I Got Asked
I made that exact point publicly this week, and within the hour someone pushed back:
“You’re a believer. Doesn’t Romans 13 say to submit to authority? Sounds like you’re complaining about a rule you say you respect.”
That stopped me for a second. Not because it was hostile. Because it was fair, and it deserved a real answer, not a swerve into a bigger point before I’d actually answered the one being asked.
So here’s the real answer: accepting a ruling and noticing the ruling was applied unevenly aren’t contradictory. Nobody in any of these stories refused the consequence. Roupp didn’t fight the warning. Treinen didn’t organize a protest or demand an apology. The Rangers didn’t sue the league. The complaint isn’t “we refuse to submit.” The complaint is “this got noticed and covered differently than plenty of other personal messages, and even personal non-participation, that go unremarked on every other night of the season.” That’s an observation about consistency. It’s not a violation of submitting to authority. You can accept the outcome and still say the outcome reveals something.
I see this exact confusion in coaching all the time, and it’s worth naming because it trips up good leaders.
What Submission Actually Requires
Submission and silence get treated like the same thing. They’re not.
When an umpire makes a call I think is wrong, I don’t argue past the warning. I take the lineup card out, make my point once, professionally, and go sit down. That’s submission to the authority of the game. But I will absolutely tell my team in the dugout what I actually saw. That’s not insubordination. That’s leadership with eyes open. The two things (accepting the call and naming what it was) live in the same moment without canceling each other out.
Same goes for an AD’s decision you don’t love, or a policy enforced harder on one group than another. Comply fully, and still say what you see. Refusing the consequence is rebellion. Naming the pattern is discernment. Coaches who can’t tell those apart either fold every time they’re challenged, or blow up every ruling into a fight. Neither one is leadership.
What Jesus Did With the Same Tension
Jesus modeled this with more precision than anyone who’s ever lived under an authority he didn’t choose.
He paid the temple tax. He told Peter to put the sword away in the garden. He stood before Pilate, a Roman authority with the power to execute him unjustly, and didn’t resist. Total submission, all the way through, to an authority structure he had every right to refuse.
And in the same breath, he never stopped naming what that structure got wrong: calling out religious leaders who used the law to avoid its heart, answering a direct question about Caesar’s authority without flinching or dodging:
“Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”
Matthew 22:21 (ESV)
That’s the whole tension in one sentence. Submit to the structure you’re under. Keep your ultimate allegiance somewhere the structure can’t touch. Those aren’t competing instructions. They’re the same instruction, lived out by the only man who ever did it perfectly.
This Week
If you’re sitting on a decision you disagree with (a call, a ruling, an evaluation, a consequence you’ve already accepted), ask yourself which one you’re actually doing. Are you refusing it, or naming what it reveals? If you’ve already taken the consequence, you have earned the right to say what you see. Just answer the real question first, every time, before you widen the lens to the bigger point. People respect a direct answer. They can smell a dodge from the cheap seats.
A leader who can submit to a structure and still tell the truth about it isn’t being inconsistent. He’s showing you exactly where his identity actually sits: neither threatened by the structure nor silenced by it.
Let’s get to work. — Coach O
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