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SF Giants to wear Sea Lions uniforms for third consecutive year

The SF Giants will honor San Francisco's Negro League past on African American Heritage Day at Oracle Park.

Steven Rissotto

SF Giants to wear Sea Lions uniforms for third consecutive year
SF Giants to wear Sea Lions uniforms for third consecutive year /
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The SF Giants will be sporting a different, yet meaningful, look during Saturday afternoon’s game against Atlanta. In celebration of African American Heritage Day at Oracle Park, the Giants will honor the San Francisco Sea Lions by wearing their jerseys on the field.

Former SF Giants first baseman Brandon Belt wears the jersey of the San Francisco Sea Lions in 2021. 

The Sea Lions competed in San Francisco for a sole season in 1946 as members of the West Coast Negro Baseball League. Despite adopting a Sea Lion as their team mascot, their uniforms displayed bears. This choice stemmed from the utilization of recycled uniforms from the now-disbanded San Francisco Cubs organization. 

Toni Stone, believed to be the first woman to play major American professional sports, is easily the most famous Sea Lions player. However, according to Curveball, a biography written by Martha Ackmann that was published in 2010, Stone left the team after learning she was being paid less than the men and received a better offer from the owner of the New Orleans Creoles.

For the third consecutive year, the Giants will don the jersey, marking the fourth instance overall. The initial occurrence was in 2014 during an away game in Atlanta, where Atlanta sported their Atlanta Black Crackers uniforms, paying homage to the history of their town's Negro League involvement.

San Francisco again used the uniforms to pay homage on Juneteenth in 2021 for the 75th anniversary of the West Coast Negro Baseball League and again in 2022 for African American Heritage Day. While they handed away Sea Lions caps last season to fans, the Giants marketing team is taking it a step forward by providing replica jerseys for the first 20,000 fans to enter the ballpark.

Next June, the Giants are set to play a regular season game against the St. Louis Cardinals at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama. Rickwood is the oldest professional ballpark in the United States and formerly the home of the Birmingham Black Barons, the old Negro League club that legendary SF Giants center fielder Willie Mays once played on. 

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Steven Rissotto
STEVEN RISSOTTO

Steven Rissotto (he/him) is an award-winning journalist who currently covers the San Francisco Giants for SFBay.ca and Giants Baseball Insider. At 19-years-old in 2021, he joined SF Bay Media as the Giants beat writer, covering games a few times a week during the Giants’ record-setting 107-win season. Along with his game story coverage he is also the host of RizzoCast, a baseball podcast he founded in 2020 that features interviews with professional and amateur baseball players, coaches, media, fans, and everyone else around the game. Past guests have included Tyler Glasnow, Bob Kendrick, Shawn Estes, Bill Laskey, Renel Brooks Moon, Dave Dravecky, Ned Colletti, Denard Span, Ron Wotus, Joe Maddon, J.T. Snow and more. He is also a co-host with Tylor Hall on the Shutdown Inning Podcast, a show focused on all the latest happenings around the baseball world. Both podcasts are available on YouTube and everywhere podcasts are found. Currently, he is a student at San Francisco State University where he is majoring in Journalism with an emphasis in print/online and minoring in education. At SF State, he is the managing editor for Golden Gate Xpress, the student-run newspaper. He was formerly a member of the newspaper at Skyline College, where he served as editor-in-chief and news editor while also writing sports and features. He was formerly a student-journalist at Archbishop Riordan High School in San Francisco, where he pitched for the baseball team and covered some of the biggest stories in campus history. This includes a new multi-sports facility on campus, the breaking news coverage of Riordan’s coed announcement and the COVID-19 pandemic. Steven is well-respected by his peers and has been honored numerous times by Student Newspapers Online, JEA, ACP, and the California Publishing Association. In 2021, he finished second in the country for Reporter of the Year for ACP among the two-year college schools.

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