Most baseball fans, when they hear the name "Billy Beane," they think of William Lamar Beane III, a weak-hitting outfielder in the major leagues from 1984 to 1989, who served as the general manager of the Oakland Athletics from 1997 to 2015, and achieved success through a philosophy that became known as "Moneyball." This became the title of a book and a movie about the team, and Beane became hailed as a genius.
A "senior adviser" to the A's franchise since 2015, Billy Beane was not a genius. A genius would have won at least one Pennant in those 19 seasons. He didn't. The argument that he didn't have the payroll to do so is stupid, because other teams that didn't spend much have won Pennants. If Beane was the man his fans think he is, he would have quit on his cheapskate bosses, and offered his services to the highest bidder.
He never has. Because then, he would have been expected to deliver. Instead, he keeps his cushy post with the A's. Billy Beane is a coward.
The same could be said of a man with almost the same name, and roughly the same talent level, and even the same position as a player, at the same time. But his cowardice had a very different cause, one forced on him, and on far too many others, by American society. And, eventually, he overcame it, and became something more important than a genius: A hero.
William Daro Bean was born on May 11, 1964 outside Los Angeles in Santa Ana, California. An outfielder, he led Santa Ana High School to a State Championship. He went to nearby Loyola Marymount University, and after his junior year, he was drafted by the Yankees. He turned them down, and helped LMU to the College World Series.
The Yankees' draft rights ran out, and the Detroit Tigers drafted him. He signed with them, and made his major league debut on April 25, 1987. It couldn't have gone much better: Leading off, playing left field, and wearing Number 4, he went 4-for-6 with an RBI, helping the Tigers beat the Kansas City Royals, 13-2 at Tiger Stadium in Detroit.
But it never got any better than that. The Tigers won the American League Eastern Division that season but he didn't make the postseason roster. He spent most of the 1988 season in the minor leagues. In 1989, he was traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers, but was stuck in their farm system, too. He played in Japan in 1992, and was signed by the San Diego Padres in 1993. He played half a season's worth of games in 1993, and again in 1994, but only 4 games in 1995, spending most of the season with the Padres' top farm team, the Las Vegas Stars of the Pacific Coast League. After that season, he retired. He was only 31 years old.
That's what the public knew at the time. Billy Bean was keeping a secret: He was gay. He had married a woman, but, by his own admission, "I wasn't fulfilled. I had a fear of not being understood, not being totally accepted. I was looking for a soul mate, someone I could let my guard down with. I only found that with men.''
He found it after being traded to San Diego, with an immigrant who had left his homeland due to being gay. Billy was worried others would find out about their relationship. Years later, he told an interviewer, “I lived 20 miles from the stadium to keep people from that casual drop-by. My partner had faith that everyone would be fine with it, but I didn't. The double life was exhausting.”
His partner was HIV-positive, and just before the 1995 season began, Billy found him unconscious in their home. Billy rushed him to the closest hospital, but remembered he had recently appeared there as a member of the Padres. Fearing that he would be outed, Bean drove an extra half-hour to a different hospital. Whether it made a difference is unclear, as his partner may have died anyway, but it was a cowardly act. So was not showing up for his partner's funeral, for fear of being exposed.
His moral failing -- not his homosexuality, but his cowardice about it -- weighed on him, and it affected his playing. He finally accepted that he could not be both a professional baseball player and a gay man, and he retired -- although, given the way he was stuck in Class AAA for most of the 1995 season, and didn't seem likely to be acquired by another team, the choice might have been less in his hands than he believed.
*
Bean came out to his family that November. He came out publicly in 1999, in an article in the Miami Herald. To this point, only 1 former player had come out, former Angeles and Oakland outfielder Glenn Burke. He had been out to his teammates, but came out publicly only after leaving baseball, in 1982, and had died in May 1995, shortly before Bean retired. Bean reached out to the Burke family, and advocated for MLB and the Dodgers to embrace him in a larger way.
He met Judy Shepard, whose son Matthew had been murdered for being gay in 1998. "She said, 'Matthew would've loved you, and he loved baseball.' I realized there's a responsibility. Sports can help people to become more accepting. I feel I've been a part of that, and I'm proud of it."
In 2014, he published a memoir, Going the Other Way. He was subsequently hired by MLB Commissioner Bud Selig as MLB’s first-ever Ambassador for Inclusion. As a senior advisor to Manfred, Bean’s role focused on player education, LGBTQ inclusion, and social justice initiatives.
MLB promoted Bean to Vice President and Special Assistant to the Commissioner in March 2017, adding anti-bullying efforts to his plate. Five years later, Bean was promoted to Senior Vice President of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
"Nowadays, there's so much more information," Bean said in 2018. "Self-identification happens a lot earlier, and open-hearted families and parents teach their children about everything in the world. It allows for an earlier evolution. I was living in a very stone-age space."
He wasn't kidding. I went to East Brunswick High School, then as now one of the largest in New Jersey. Doing the math, I discovered that, over my 3 years there -- East Brunswick keeps its 9th graders at a lower school -- there were 3,000 separate students there. To this day, 40 years (minus a few weeks) after I first attended EBHS, out of those 3,000, the number I now know to have been gay is 2.
Two, out of three thousand. There were more teachers suspected of being gay than students. And neither could be open about it. Because it was a terrifying time for gay people. Actor Rock Hudson died from AIDS early in my junior year, and the jokes were cruel. Students, especially boys, who were suspected of being gay were tormented. Although I had no personal stake in gay rights, I had been bullied for my disability, so I knew what it was like to be mistreated for something that wasn't my fault, and it made me a sympathizer on the issue.
And they had no heroes to look up to. Elton John, David Bowie and Freddie Mercury? Now, they are icons of a movement, as well as superstars on merit. But at the time, it was as if their talent and their achievements didn't matter: They weren't just "homos," they were "drug fiends" -- and the fact that they weren't even American was a factor in their unacceptability as heroes for teenage American boys. But all those "hair metal" bands, with their long hair and makeup? Somehow, that was "macho." Not like what today's conservatives say about drag shows. God DAMN, the Eighties was a stupid decade.)
Actors? None that were both alive and out. Athletes? Not male ones, and the establishment was still treating the top openly lesbian athlete of the time, Martina Navratilova, as practically an alien. (Coming from Czechoslovakia, a Communist country that is now two free countries, didn't help, never mind that she chose to escape from it.)
No, gay kids weren't allowed to have heroes. They weren't allowed to accept themselves as themselves, let alone be accepted by others. Someone once joked that, for gay people, the Seventies were their "Sixties." If that's true, then the Eighties were another "Fifties." And that would have been true even if AIDS had never happened. I was there, and I know what the bigots said. It was the bigotry against it that was the "ugly," "deviant," "unnatural," "abnormal," "aberrant," "repulsive" lifestyle.
And so, boys like Billy Bean, Glenn Burke, Jerry Smith, Greg Louganis, Jason Collins and Robbie Rogers couldn't have the heroes they needed. They had to become the heroes their successors would need. For Burke and Smith, who died from the effects of AIDS, it was too late. The others, including Bean, have made the most of their time.
Late last year, Bean was diagnosed with leukemia. He died yesterday, August 6, 2024, at the age of 60. He had more to do. But he can rest with the knowledge that his work will be continued, and that it has not only made up for what he could have done earlier, but didn't, but that he may end up having a more lasting impact upon baseball and American life than players who did far more on the field.
No comments:
Post a Comment