Major League Baseball got a great bit of news this weekend: Brewers minor leaguer David Denson came out. He’s a corner bat playing first base and a little bit of left field for the Helena Brewers in the Northwest Rookie league. He’s a 20-year-old from Southern California drafted in the 15th round of the 2014 draft. And as he disclosed to teammates, he’s gay.
There’s a lot to like about how this has been handled, by the Brewers organization, by Denson’s teammates, by Tom Haudricourt’s reporting in the Milwaukee-Journal Sentinel. And that reflects the benefits of baseball’s work toward this moment, in training sessions it has done with LGBT organizations, and especially in its decision to hire former MLB outfielder Billy Bean -- who came out after his career ended -- as its "ambassador for inclusion."
But in all of that, the thing that’s most striking about the news is the support Denson appears to have gotten at the outset from his teammates. And that’s a reflection of a couple of facts on the ground that we should readily understand: Players are young, and the younger generations get that another person’s sexuality isn’t about them. It’s why we see polls like ESPN’s last year, which said 81 percent of MLB players said they agreed with Yankees manager Joe Girardi that the game was ready for an out player. In a similar poll of NFL players, 86 percent felt the same way.
So the guys who are generally under 30 and already on the field get it, and they’re either OK with it or they don’t think it’s relevant to the job they have to do. That’s awesome news, the kind of attitude you’d want to see in any workplace.
But how about management or the media? Well, that remains to be seen. MLB’s initiatives on this front, with Bean on the front line, are already admirable, and we’ll see the impact of their efforts in the years to come. But is management going to be indifferent or reluctant about signing the first out free agent? Or drafting and signing an out amateur player? That’s an important question for the game today after Michael Sam walked away from football. And I cannot help but think, in that instance and in the future, that responsible media reaction to any player in any sport coming out will be a key component to taking things down a notch and letting players do what they really want to do, which is play and prepare when they aren’t fending off the media with well-honed clichés and thoughtful responses about their performances.
Denson isn’t the first out player in MLB history. It was Glenn Burke with the Dodgers and later the A’s in the ’70s, playing at a time when we didn’t have press releases to announce sexuality, and that reflects the strange observer’s paradox we have today when it comes to sexuality in sports: If the media didn’t report a historical fact, did it happen? Burke’s teammates knew, his managers knew, his organizations knew, and the responses of men like Tommy Lasorda and Billy Martin helped wreck Burke’s career. And Denson isn’t the only current out baseball player -- independent league pitcher Sean Conroy came out in June.
What they, and Bean, and former ump Dave Pallone and current ump Dale Scott all reflect is that there are gay men in baseball, and while that’s news now, it’s their coming out that’s going to get us to the point in time that all of us will probably welcome: when it isn’t news.
I think we’ll all be interested in seeing how Denson is treated by opponents, by fans and by umps when he’s on the field. MLB has been preparing for this moment for a while, so I’m a bit of an optimist that it’s going to work out. I expect Denson will go as far as he’s supposed to on the basis of his ability to realize his gifts as a baseball player.
What do you need to know? I’m reminded of a conversation I had with former NFL player Wade Davis two years ago, when he talked about layers of identity, that he’s simultaneously a black man, a man of faith and gay, but at his core, he identifies himself as an athlete. I’ve heard much the same from Bean. And you’ll hear that same message from male, female and transgender athletes of any sexuality.
So my expectation is that if Denson is anything like the other pro athletes who have come out, his sense of self starts from the exact same place as that of every one of his teammates, and every person who takes the field: He’s a ballplayer. And that’s as true today, tomorrow and forever as it was before he came out.
Christina Kahrl writes about MLB for ESPN. You can follow her on Twitter.
