SF Giants' Kalshi deal just continues a year of awful P.R. for the organization

Things have been bad on the field for the SF Giants this season. Really bad. They’re most likely going to lose 90-something games and yet somehow they’ve almost had just as bad of a season off the field.

The first big P.R. nightmare for the club came after Pride Night earlier in June. Several players chose to protest by writing biblical verses on their hats and the response from the Giants was delayed and sloppy.

President of baseball operations Buster Posey refused to answer questions on the matter after a brief statement, a letter to fans from the Giants was found lacking, and Larry Baer didn’t exactly smooth things over when he addressed the matter on KNBR.

Many fans were deeply hurt by the team’s mishandling of the situation and one can only wonder how the team is going to handle future Pride Nights at the ballpark especially if more players choose to protest.

That was one self-inflicted error, and now the latest one is the team’s partnership with the prediction market company Kalshi. The deal was roundly criticized when it was initially announced and all it took was the team’s first social media post promoting Kalshi during a game to open the floodgates of fan discontent.

A post about the team’s win probability going up after a clutch hit from Bryce Eldridge on Wednesday night against the Pittsburgh Pirates included a prompt to “trade” or what others might call “bet” or “gamble” on Kalshi.

Many Giants fans despise team's partnership with Kalshi

The criticism was fast and fierce in the replies as it’s clear the backlash to this partnership is not going away anytime soon. The fact that MLB teams, and MLB itself, have partnered with all of these prediction markets like Kalshi or Polymarket is just so laughable when gambling and baseball were seen as two things that simply don’t mix.

Anyone who has seen the movie Eight Men Out or knows about how Pete Rose got blacklisted in baseball probably can’t believe that MLB is tying itself to this industry so closely. One wonders how long it will last especially since federal courts are already weighing in on whether these companies are essentially just gambling entities which would lead to stricter regulations.

It is just gross to a lot of Giants fans that the team is associating itself with one of these companies just to make a little extra money. Maybe the backlash will be so fierce that the Giants end the partnership, but the lesson they probably learned from the whole Pride Night debacle is that no matter how badly they mishandle it eventually people will move on.

That may be true in the short term, but neither of these issues are going away anytime soon so maybe San Francisco’s front office and upper management should use whatever money it got from Kalshi to take some P.R. classes so they can at least try to navigate the waters better when they inevitably tick off fans again in the future.

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