The fiasco involving the San Diego Gay Men's Chorus and the national anthem before last Saturday's Padres game was the product of human error, worsened by the team's entertainment staff handling unfamiliar responsibilities, Major League Baseball announced Thursday. Padres President and CEO Mike Dee on Twitter also said Art Romero, who was deemed responsible and was fired after the incident, has been rehired.
Baseball executives conducted a dozen interviews of people involved in the "regrettable situation" in which a recording of a woman singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" was played instead of a version by the chorus, according to an MLB statement.
RELATED: San Diego Gay Men’s Chorus Still Hurting After National Anthem Mishap
Members of the chorus were subjected to heckling when they left the field, and questions were subsequently raised about the motivation behind the incident. It was a black eye for the team a little over a month before San Diego hosts the All-Star Game.
The situation was exacerbated because the lead entertainment supervisor was in a traffic collision the day before and took Saturday off, so employees had to perform duties for which they were "insufficiently trained," according to the MLB statement. The employees had "no malicious" intentions and "universally relayed contrition" for what happened, the MLB concluded.
MLB "received the full cooperation of Padres management, which expressed its deepest apologies," the statement said. "MLB believes that the Padres efforts to remedy the situation, including its invitation to the chorus to return to a future game to perform the national anthem, are appropriate and has every expectation that the club's longstanding record of inclusion will be evident in the future."
Romero, who goes by the stage name DJ Artform, was fired after the incident. The chorus called for his reinstatement earlier this week, and Dee said in a statement on Twitter Thursday that Romero "has accepted (the Padres') invitation to continue to provide services for the team, in a role to be determined."
