It tells how we lost touch that the last time I contacted Billy Bean was when the movie “Moneyball” came out in 2011. His namesake, Oakland baseball executive Billy Beane, was played in the movie by actor Brad Pitt.
“Maybe you can get Brad Pitt to star in your movie,” I texted.
“A movie about a .226 hitter?” he said.
Bean’s batting average wasn’t mentioned in his obituary after Major League Baseball announced he died Tuesday of leukemia at age 60. Being an openly gay former player was mentioned. Being MLB’s senior vice president for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion was mentioned.
Because Bean was a good voice for so many hidden voices while eluding any easy gay stereotype — he had a 10-year pro baseball career — he was in demand. Years before joining the MLB office he was the media’s go-to talker for any gay issue that intersected with the sports pages.
“Newspapers, TV stations, radio, ESPN is sending over a crew,” Bean said to me back in 2002 when a false report said New York Mets catcher Mike Piazza was gay.
Bean didn’t covet the attention. He was just done running from it. He retired from the San Diego Padres at 31 after watching his partner die of a ruptured pancreas one night and playing a game the next day without telling anyone. He didn’t attend his partner’s public funeral for fear he would be outed.
He also didn’t come out on his own, but was pushed out a few years after retirement by a newspaper story he thought was about a Miami Beach restaurant he managed.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” asked his best friends in baseball, San Diego teammates Brad Ausmus and Trevor Hoffman.
“How many gay men do you know?” he asked.
They knew one. Him. And they knew him as a hard-working teammate with a smart outlook who was, by then, testing career channels after building two restaurants.
He worked briefly as the late-night producer for WQAM host Ed Kaplan to try the radio business as a way to stay in touch with baseball. He’d take listeners inside the game in interesting ways: explaining as a left-handed hitter why he was scared of facing left-handed pitcher Randy Johnson; noting the Marlins young players benefit from playing before small home crowds who wouldn’t boo their mistakes; and why 90%, as he put it, in the game were taking steroids.
That’s how I met him in the studio one radio night. He was a sports junkie, a fan of all games, someone who not only had something to say but the ability to say it.
We did a little radio. We played some pick-up basketball games together, though as a former high school quarterback and pro athlete he dominated the courts.
He wanted a job in baseball “to go in the door I walked out of,” he said. I wrote about his hope to get an interview with the Marlins for an entry-level job.
“I’d enjoy the work,” he said. “I think I could help the organization. But I know there’s a hurdle.”
The hurdle, of course, remains the last one in male team sports. It has changed by degrees since Bean left baseball — “It’s improving,” he once said, a few years before taking the job in the MLB office in 2014.
He saw the steps being made across sports. John Amaechi and Jason Collins, both now retired, came out as gay in the final stage of their NBA careers. Michael Sam became the first openly gay NFL player to be drafted when he was a seventh-round pick in 2014.
“I know there are a lot of people who see me as a reference point on this,” he said. “And I see in my mind if there’s another gay baseball player or two — or 10 or 25 or 100 — they’re just people you walk by every day.
“Like I did, they just want to play the game. And it’s a difficult enough game already without something else on your mind.”
He had “pain and deep regret,” as he once said, for how he ended his baseball career. That only helped him realize the work waiting for him. The .226 hitter became a strong voice in a sports world needing one, a role model no doubt for some players looking for one.
