A New Yorker–register column on the Giants' Genesis 9 Pride Night saga, two weeks later, anchored on a fresh and previously-uncovered fact: fans booing protesting pitcher Landen Roupp on his June 25 return to the Oracle Park mound.

There is a specific sound a baseball crowd makes when it has decided something. Not the roar — the roar is easy, the roar is what 40,000 people do when a ball clears the wall. The booing is harder. Booing is deliberation. It rolls in sections, it argues with itself, it has a guilty conscience because the man on the mound is yours, he wears the same script-letter cap you paid forty dollars for, and you are booing him anyway.

On the night of June 25, Landen Roupp walked out to the Oracle Park mound for the first time since Pride Night, and some meaningful number of Giants fans booed him (Yahoo Sports). Sit with how strange that is. This is San Francisco. This is the franchise that ran Until There's a Cure Day in 1994, said to be the first AIDS-awareness event in major American pro sports — a team that built three decades of genuine standing with the Bay Area's gay community before most franchises would say the word "Pride" out loud. And on a Thursday in late June, that same fan base booed its own starting pitcher.

To recap the thing they were booing about, because the details matter: on June 12, against the Cubs, the Giants handed their players rainbow-themed caps for Pride Night. Three pitchers — Roupp, JT Brubaker, and Ryan Walker — inscribed "Gen 9:12-16" on theirs, the verse about the rainbow as God's covenant, a clever bit of scriptural jiu-jitsu that reclaims the rainbow from the people in the stands who'd made it theirs. A fourth, reliever Sam Hentges, simply declined to wear the cap. It was, depending on where you sit, a principled act of conscience or a calculated middle finger delivered on the one night the organization asked its players to stand somewhere specific.

What happened next is the part that's eaten at me across the four times I've written about this. The Giants, as an institution, mostly declined to be an institution. They acknowledged the players' actions had caused "pain and anger" (SF Standard) — the passive-voice apology, pain that simply occurred, anger that arose, no subject in the sentence doing the causing. Labor lawyers told the Chronicle the protesters likely aren't protected by religious-liberty law anyway, that "this is a team sport" and a uniform is a uniform (SF Chronicle). The team's own fan blog, McCovey Chronicles, ran a piece arguing Buster Posey "fail[ed] spectacularly to meet the moment." Everyone wanted someone else to be the adult. Management wanted the players to self-correct. The players wanted management to have their backs. The commissioner's office said the cap guidance had been botched in the first place.

Into that vacuum of accountability walked the only body left with the standing to issue a ruling: the crowd.

I want to be careful here, because this is exactly the place where a writer reaches for a number he doesn't have. I don't have the gate. I don't know whether Rainbow Families' call to "spend your money elsewhere" actually dented the turnstiles, and I'm not going to pretend the attendance told a story it may not have told. What I have is the sound — reported, datelined, June 25, Roupp on the mound, boos coming down. That's a smaller fact than a boycott. It might also be a truer one.

Because a boycott is an absence, and absence is ambiguous. The empty seat could be a protest or it could be a Tuesday. A boo is a presence. The people booing Roupp showed up. They bought the ticket, they parked, they paid nine dollars for the garlic fries, and then they used their own bought-and-paid-for evening to tell a man in their own uniform that he'd gotten it wrong. That's not a boycott. That's the opposite of a boycott. It's a fan base refusing to cede the building.

This is the thing the realignment years taught me to watch for, the thing I keep circling back to since they shipped Cal and Stanford off to the ACC and Oregon to the Big Ten — that the relationship between a city and its team is not a customer-service contract. It's older and weirder than that. It's a covenant, which is a funny word to use given the verse in question. You don't get to opt out of your team the way you opt out of a streaming service. You're stuck with them, which means when they embarrass you, the grief has nowhere to go. So it comes out as a boo. The boo is what loyalty sounds like when it's been betrayed but refuses to leave.

And the boo cuts both ways, which is why it's honest in a way none of the official statements were. Somewhere in those sections on the 25th were people booing Roupp for the protest, and people booing the booers for booing, and people who came specifically because Fox News called the team's vow-renewal ceremony "virtue-signaling" and they wanted to stand against that. Oracle Park on June 25 contained the entire argument, fully assembled, at full volume, with a baseball game breaking out underneath it. The front office spent two weeks trying to find a statement that would make the argument go away. The crowd just had the argument, out loud, the way a healthy democracy of forty thousand people is supposed to.

I don't know how this ends for Roupp. Pitchers get booed back into favor every season; a few good starts and a pennant race launder a lot of sin, and San Francisco forgives the way every great baseball town forgives — completely, and on its own schedule, and never quite on the record. But I know what I heard reported on the 25th, and I know it was more honest than anything that came out of the press office.

They handed these men a rainbow and asked them to wear it for one night. Four of them said no. And when they came home, the building they'd asked to choose for them finally answered — not in a statement, not in a settlement, but in the oldest language the cheap seats have. The cathedral booed back.