Friday BP: Darren Criss to sing anthem for Giants home opener

Mar 24, 2023 - 12:00 PM

Good morning, baseball fans!

I was over the moon yesterday when the San Francisco Giants announced that Emmy and Golden Globe award winner Darren Criss will be appearing to sing the national anthem for the home opener on April 7th against the Kansas City Royals.

Criss is perhaps best known for his roles on “Glee” and “American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace” (for which he won Emmy and Golden Globe awards in 2018). He is also an accomplished musician, a San Francisco native, and a life long Giants fan.

@DarrenCriss via Twitter

Full disclosure, I might be one of the biggest Darren Criss fans there is. I’ve followed him since his days on YouTube, where he got his start singing Disney covers, and then with the theater company he co-founded called Starkid Productions, with whom he played Harry Potter in their A Very Potter Musical series.

In the peak years of his run as Blaine Anderson on “Glee” I had hoped to see him get to sing at one of the Giants’ playoff home games in the 2010-2014 championship era, but it was his “Glee” co-star Matthew Morrison (a friend of Barry Zito) who got the opportunity in Game 2 of the 2012 World Series. So this will mark Criss’ first time singing the anthem for his hometown team.

I’ve seen Criss perform live multiple times, most recently when he was starring in a run of Hedwig and the Angry Inch in San Francisco in 2016. Not only was his love for the Giants enshrined in his section of the playbill, but he made repeated references to (then) AT&T Park during the show (which features a fair amount of ad-libbing in the performances).

So I, for one, am even more excited now about the home opener and Giants baseball returning to Oracle Park.