San Diego Padres Apologize to San Diego Gay Men’s Chorus for National Anthem Blunder

The performance by the San Diego Gay Men's Chorus was supposed to be part of the festivities of "Pride Night" at Petco Park. Instead, the prerecorded female vocalist performing the anthem while the chorus stood on the field became an embarrassing for everyone involved. Although the Padres concluded that the error was unintentional, they still terminated their agreement with the third party group responsible for the mishap. The choir issued a statement on their Facebook page and did not like the actions taken by the Padres following the mishap.

"We applaud San Diego Padres President and Chief Executive Office Mike Dee for reaching out to our organization to apologize and to offer to meet with LGBT leaders to discuss the incident. We look forward to this meeting. We believe it is important to work together with the San Diego Padres organization to build bridges within the LGBT community rather than burn them down as happened last night. However, we are very disappointed with the San Diego Padres dismissively brief two sentence statement at 9:37 p.m. on Saturday, May 21, 2016 which did not appropriately address the gravity of the situation nor pay due to the 100 volunteers who took to the field in celebration and were led off in humiliation."

On the field, the Padres are 19-26 and 7.5 games behind San Francisco for first place in the NL West. They begin a series with the Giants at AT&T Park tonight.