Putting families in a pickle

The Portland Pickles are a summer collegiate wooden-bat baseball team that plays in a cozy 1,500-seat ballpark. Families from east Portland and neighboring communities bring their kids there to enjoy summer nights during the Pickles’ roughly two-month season, which runs from late May through early August.

The Pickles’ website billed July 14 as the team’s Hockey Night. I didn’t attend the game, so I can only assume the Pickles’ primary intent was to lure fans of the Portland Winterhawks, a high-level junior hockey team that develops potential college and pro prospects, and perhaps the Seattle Kraken, the National Hockey League’s Pacific Northwest franchise whose games are broadcast on local radio and cable TV. (Attempts to contact the Pickles proved unsuccessful.) Such promotions are standard for teams like the Pickles, who often partner with local teams from other sports so both clubs can draw new fans.

Fans who did attend the Pickles’ July 14 game against the Willamette Wild Bills, however, learned that the game was “Heated Rev-Dill-Ry Night.” The poorly coined pun—which I clearly don’t relish—drew its name from Heated Rivalry, HBO’s series about gay male hockey players who fall in love despite playing for opposing pro teams.

At one point during the game, a pitcher in a Pickles uniform plunked a Wild Bills batter. The batter responded by charging the mound—not to pummel the pitcher, but to kiss him long and hard in full view of the fans in attendance.

“Our cottage was packed,” the Pickles posted on X. “Tongues were used. Things got heated. … Oh, and there was baseball.”

The Pickles have pulled wild stunts before: Last year, for instance, they inserted into their lineup a “random” fan from the stands who homered in his second at-bat. He later turned out to be the starting second baseman for Lewis & Clark College, a Portland-based NCAA Division III school. So it’s possible the two men who smooched by the pitcher’s mound may not have been actual baseball players, but actors. (The pitcher—who goes by J.P. Hardy, according to Fox News—is not listed on the Pickles’ roster, and the batter’s identity is unknown.)

I also got the sense that the Pickles were a left-leaning organization catering to a left-leaning crowd when I visited their ballpark for the first time last year. They had Pride flags spread throughout the stadium—not an unexpected sight in late June—and a Planned Parenthood advertisement on the left-field wall. And a fan in front of me was not particularly welcoming toward a grandfather wearing a red MAGA hat.

Many fans in uber-liberal Portland applauded the bit: “The only time on a baseball field a player can be both Out and Safe,” one fan wrote on the Pickles’ Facebook page.

But guess who isn’t so safe anymore? Families—especially Christian families—who just want to take their kids out to enjoy a wholesome, affordable, ideology-free good time. Make no mistake: The Pickles’ stunt was an act of grooming—no different than the cartoons on Netflix that show little boys donning ballerina outfits and tiaras and dancing for their two dads. The Pickles took something kid-friendly and perverted it to make something abnormal seem normal.

But there is a big difference we must recognize. Parents can control the clickers in their own homes. At the Pickles game, they had no idea the same-sex kiss was coming and couldn’t exactly turn off the tube at the first sign of troubling content.

“The divide between sane America and the demented America that Portland wants to export across the country couldn’t be any clearer,” Joe Kinsey wrote for OutKick. “This isn’t about two men kissing. This is about taking one of the final wholesome places left for families … and turning it into a (liberal) stunt factory where kids are subjected to the Alphabet Mafia’s whims.”

Americans are getting pretty sick of catering to those whims. Back in June, the York Revolution, an independent minor league baseball team in Pennsylvania, had to cancel its Pride Night game against the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs—because so many players refused to wear jerseys with rainbow-colored sleeves that the Revolution couldn’t field a full squad of nine players. And when Major League Baseball threatened to penalize three San Francisco Giants pitchers for scrawling “Genesis 9:12-16” on their caps to protest their team’s Pride Night, Republican U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley sent a letter to MLB demanding that the organization answer for “an apparent pattern of discriminating against Christians while promoting left-wing ideologies.”

But using the game itself as a vehicle to push LGBTQ ideology on impressionable young children is simply wrong.