The gay Babe Ruth

The first active major leaguer to come out of the closet may ruin his career -- or he could become a cultural hero.

By King Kaufman

May 23, 2002 | The list of great gay baseball players is long and distinguished. It would astonish you to see who's on it.

Of course, nobody knows who's on it.

Wouldn't you love to see it, though? Wouldn't it be fun to put together an all-time all-gay team with a five-man starting rotation that accounted for 1,500 wins, or a starting lineup that hit 3,000 home runs? Who's the gay Babe Ruth, anyway? Maybe it's Babe Ruth!

A century from now we'll be able to put together a team of openly gay stars, I have no doubt. (Well, I won't be able to, with my crappy eating habits, but you'll still be around.) If even the conservative estimates of gays in the population are right -- let's say 2 percent -- hundreds of gays have played in the majors, and odds are that every other team that ever took the field had a gay player.

This is a topic of conversation for the second straight season because of comments made this week by New York Mets manager Bobby Valentine and his star catcher, Mike Piazza. Valentine says in the upcoming June/July Details magazine that baseball is "probably ready for an openly gay player."

Last year gays in baseball were a brief cause célèbre because Brendan Lemon, the editor of Out magazine, wrote in an editor's letter that he had been having an affair with a player on an East Coast club, "not his team's biggest star, but a very recognizable media figure." Lemon urged his friend to come out, arguing that it would ease the player's "psychic burden" and adding, "I'm pretty confident there'd be more support from the team than he imagines."

No player ever copped to a relationship with Lemon, whose opinion was called naive by the only living openly gay man who ever played major league ball, former utility infielder Billy Bean, who came out in 1999, four years after the end of his undistinguished playing career.

"There's so much money involved, you'd have to be foolish or very rich to put your career in jeopardy," Bean said in response to Lemon's letter. "It would become a circus. I've never met the person that I think could do it."

Now here's Valentine telling Details that "the players are a diverse enough group now that I think they could handle it."

The New York Post speculated Monday that his comments were a sort of preemptive strike. "Some may think that Valentine is getting in first, before one of his big guns is outed," wrote gossip columnist Neal Travis. "There is a persistent rumor around town that one Mets star who spends a lot of time with pretty models in clubs is actually gay and has started to think about declaring his sexual orientation."

Yeah, not that a gay player would be any kind of big deal or anything in this day and age, but New York sports radio has talked of nothing else all week. I said this was a topic of conversation. Well, nobody's even come out yet, and this is a topic of conversation in New York like "Attack of the Clones" is a topic of conversation in "Star Wars" chat rooms.

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