Each time Daniel Murphy does something good in the batter’s box, the Rockies’ first baseman is generating donations to LGBTQ charities.
Thatap the idea behind a crowdfunding effort on Twitter started by four Rockies fans earlier this year. They’re aiming to reconcile their Rockies fandom with Murphy’s history of anti-gay comments.
“There’s a lot of people in the LGBTQ community who are Rockies fans and who have been torn since the season started, because they signed a guy who has been outspoken against LGBTQ,” said Nick Stephens, a bi-sexual who founded Bases for Pride along with friends Connor Farrell, Nick Tremaroli and Judy Steele, who identify as straight.
“Ultimately we’re trying to make it so people can feel a little bit better about continuing to support the team with Murphy on it, and also feel like we’re doing good things within the LGBTQ community,” Stephens said. “We’re making the best of a situation that is kind of uncomfortable, because honestly we do root for him.”
When with the Mets in 2015, Murphy said he He didn’t exactly walk that statement back last summer after being traded to the Cubs. A devout Christian who cited his faith as the basis for his views, Murphy’s original comments came after Billy Bean, an openly gay former player and MLB’s ambassador for inclusion, visited the Mets.
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Murphy, who advocated for inclusion in his last public remarks about the subject is aware of the Bases For Pride campaign.
“If people are willing to take their time and talents and donate it to something that they feel is greater than themselves, then all the power to them,” he said this past week.
The Bases For Pride concept goes all the way back to the last year Murphy played in New York, 2015, when he made the anti-gay comments in spring training and then helped lead the Mets to the National League pennant. It was then that Jenn Rubenstein, a Washington fan who identifies as queer/nonbinary, had the same cognitive dissonance many Rockies fans are dealing with.
With their hometown Nationals out of the playoffs, they decided to root for their dad’s Mets the rest of the way, with a simple statistical formula ($1 for a hit, $4 for a homer) to raise funds via how Murphy did at the plate. They continued the idea when Murphy signed with the Nationals the following season, branding the campaign as as they used sabermetrics to drive fundraising for a different LGBTQ charity each month.
“When it first started, I didn’t think of it as something that other people would also be interested in. It was entirely within my own mind – like, ‘How can I reconcile that I’m rooting for this team with a guy with views like that?’” Rubenstein said. “It was a month or two into the season before I realized that people were paying attention and matching me, so thatap when I made its own Twitter and blog.”
Bases For Pride took Rubenstein’s #QueerFancyStats concept and applied it to Rockies Twitter, where it’s grown from a few friends to over 100 donors. This year the campaign has for various LGBTQ charities around the state and the country such as the Denver LGBT Community Center, the Matthew Shepard Foundation, the National Center for Transgender Equality and more.
“When we started, we were expecting like 10 people,” Judy Steele said. “The fact we have 10 times that and the season isn’t even over is astounding. And with each new benchmark we hit, we start to further realize the impact this is having.”
Murphy’s surge in offensive production since his early-season finger injury healed has Bases For Pride rolling in the donations, which Stephens said are done on the honor system by each pledger. The first baseman is hitting .296 with 11 home runs and 61 RBIs entering the weekend, and despite poor defensive metrics, his hustle and hitting have even made fans of some of his former critics.
For example, Brenda Brostrom, a 58-year-old Rockies diehard who lives in Idaho Springs, is pledging $10 for each homer and $1 for each RBI as part of Bases For Pride. She’s donated $171 since signing up.
“Watching him for a while now, he’s kind of funny and quirky out there running and in the field, and he’s grown on me, I’ll say,” said Brostrom, who identifies as straight. “Now I feel like I’m donating for not anything to do with him, but he’s just sort of the thing that measures what we’re doing. I feel like I’m sort of donating with him, instead of because of him.”
As for the future of Bases For Pride — Murphy has one year left on his two-year contract with Colorado — Steele, who does much of the work in keeping the donation spreadsheet updated, said she’d like to see it continue in some form. But that might not mean tying it to Murphy again. Instead, Steele’s brainstorming other performance-driven crowd-funding that’s tied to a more positive source, as Rubenstein has done this year by using the pitching sabermetrics of to build donations for #QueerFancyStats.
In the meantime, Brostrom, Steele, Stephens and others hope that Bases For Pride shows Murphy the impact his words have had on the LGBTQ community.
“I don’t necessarily expect this to have changed his mind, but I do hope itap opened his eyes a little bit as to why these comments have followed him around, and why we’re doing this sort of thing,” Brostrom said. “He might never be okay with (the LGTBQ community), but maybe now he’s learned to live with it.”
This past week, in Houston, when specifically asked whether his views on the LGBTQ community had evolved from his 2015 comments, Murphy sidestepped the question.
“I tell you what — I’m really excited about playing the Astros tonight, and seeing if we can take the first game of the series,” he said.
