Because there aren't any. And there's a good reason for that.
Say you had a job where you were constantly in close physical contact some of the hottest women on earth, often hot and sweaty and naked or nearly so. Do you think you'd be able to focus on the job? That's what it's like for a homosexual male on the field or in the locker room.
Even if a gay had the talent to play ball there's no way he could compete in that environment.
Its a fair question and supposition. It could be he had a sexual "in" as it were that kept him around. But I tend to think it was what I call the "handling the road" ability.
Going on the road/constantly traveling for work is difficult. You get exhausted and worn down, you don't sleep well, etc. While it might be exciting at first, you become numb to each new city and town. As Steve probably might agree after his book tour, its fun for a while, but exhausting.
Add to that the temptations of a rich young celebrity ball player: groupies banging down your door nightly, luxurious food and drink, alcohol, club partying, other celebrities wanting to hang with you, drug dealers, gambling, interviews media fights, strip clubs, brothels, financial scammers, gold diggers, and people generally trying to scam you for everything else. Most guys can't handle it, get distracted and wash out. So athletes need to show not only that they can do the job at a major league level, but also that they can handle the pressures, depression, and distractions of the road as well; they are really 2 separate jobs, and pro athletes need to able to do both.
When you hear phrases like "crafty old veteran" or "veteran leadership" to explain why Team X just hired some jabroni guy with crap stats, understand he may be there to offer a calming influence on younger guys, yank them out of strip clubs before closing time so they can be rested for the game the next day, and himself be able to show up every day on the road and be able to give you consistent performance, even if subpar.
Gay Bean may just have been able to handle the road well enough to be kept around. Not being interested in sleeping with females likely helped a lot, and I've never heard of "gay groupies" for baseball, especially not during that time. Gambling is more of a straight male thing (higher T), Gay Bean probably kept the media at arms length to keep himself closeted, and so Gay Bean's distractions were minimized to drugs, alcohol, finance, and the wear and tear on the road. So teams likely kept him around for that.
In addition, it seems fairer to say that Bean and Beane had "mediocre *major* league talent." If 60 Wins Above Replacement makes you Hall of Fame material, then the middle 68% of the curve must be bounded by -6 to +6 WAR. Or something. With career length factored in. Does anyone know?
Pre-MeToo'ed Garrison Keillor notwithstanding, all major leaguers can't be above average for a stat like WAR.
Edit: WAR distribution has to be quite skewed; much better players return next year while much worse players don't. For each season, average WAR must be zero, but over time, there should be many short-termers with modestly negative numbers balanced by fewer veterans who are solidly in the black.
Lesbians, not gay men. As Steve once wrote, lesbians tend to like playing competitive sports way more than gay men, who prefer activities that show off their bodies first. That's because both homosexual groups are trying to attract their own kind: women prefer men who are "winners" at something, especially sports, so lesbians try to win at sports, while men prefer their partners to be physically good looking, so gay men try to show off their bodies as sexually attractive, because a homerun hitting guy who's ugly is less a catch for a gay than a twink who looks like Justin Bieber.
> As a utility outfielder and first baseman (i.e., he couldn’t play key defensive positions)
This was because Gay Bean was a lefty, and the geometry of baseball prevents them from playing these positions
> their career statistics as ballplayers are weirdly similar, as I shall document below
I know you don't read the comments at your other blog, but I mentioned Gay Bean's passing over there. Ron Mexico and I had a spirited discussion about the two Bean(e)s, which I will reproduce below for those who missed it. For those who don't want to read it, my thesis was that Beane was a much larger flop as a player, mostly because he was much more hyped coming out of high school, turning down a scholarship from Stanford to sign with the New York Mets, while Gay Bean played for four seasons at Loyola Marymount.
ScarletNumber: August 6, 10:03 pm
O/T
In iSteve news, openly-gay baseball player Billy Bean died today at the age of 60. He had a 6-year career, mostly with the San Diego Padres. To be clear, this was NOT Moneyball Billy Beane. The irony is that Bean had a better playing career than Beane did, even though the latter was more hyped.
Ron Mexico: August 7, 12:39 pm
“better playing career”
BB (-2.0 WAR, 5 HR, .226 BA) vs. BBe (-1.6 WAR, 3 HR, .219 BA)
tomatoes, tomahtos
I noticed they were both Tigers in 1988. That must have been confusing to the casual fan.
ScarletNumber: August 8, 3:46 am
LOL I didn’t say that Bean had a MUCH better career, but he did play 272 games in his 6-year career, while Beane played 148. Bean als0 had an OPS of .574 while Beane’s was .543. However, as close as their statistics were, Beane was the much bigger flop, as he turned down a scholarship to Stanford in order to sign with the Mets. Then, adding insult to injury, Stanford revoked his admission completely!
In his playing career, Beane was most useful as trade bait, as it allowed the Mets to acquire Tim Teufel, who was their platoon second baseman for their 86 World Series and 88 NL East championship teams.
You are correct that they were both members of the 1988 Tigers, but they were not teammates as Beane played all of his games in April while Bean played all of his in September. Bean was on the team in 1987, though, so I’m sure that was confusing for fans. However, they were teammates on the 1988 Toledo Mud Hens, so I’m sure it was confusing when manager Pat Corrales had to send in his reports 🤣
While he is two years younger than Elway, Elway had redshirted in middle school because his family moved so much (his father was a college football coach), so when Beane graduated high school Elway had just completed his freshman year at Stanford. This would have given Beane only one or two years as Stanford's starter.
Beane was so hyped as a baseball player that he was placed higher in the minors by the Mets than another one of their first-round selections that year, Darryl Strawberry. In the minors Beane roomed with Lenny Dykstra, who is a known meat head. One day in spring training the Mets were playing the Phillies and Steve Carlton was pitching and Dykstra had no idea who he was! Showing that ignorance is bliss, Dykstra proclaimed that he would have no problem facing Carlton, and he was correct, going 3-for-7 off of him in his career.
My friend's little brother was Elway's successor at Stanford, although in his one year as Stanford's starter he didn't make them forget Elway.
There's something to be said for going to a college where you'll get more than one year as a starter. Kurt Warner, for example, got stuck behind two other QBs in college for three years, got one year to start, was pretty good, but nobody noticed, and then he was stocking shelves.
I know you're not talking about him here, but were you a friend of Jack McDowell's family? He is an alumnus of Notre Dame HS in Sherman Oaks as well as Stanford, and he was eight years behind you at NDHS.
I was referring to a different family involving NDHS and Stanford, but, yes, I played basketball against the 15 year old Jack McDowell, and was absolutely destroyed trying to guard him.
Without mentioning their name, you wrote the following paragraph over at Blogspot 10 years ago and I had always assumed it was about the McDowells:
A problem that most black and many white pro athletes have is that they typically don’t have any nuclear family members that they can (reasonably) trust to manage their money for them. In contrast, a high school friend of mine, whose father was a respected lawyer, became a CPA. One of his younger brothers grew up to be a star baseball player who graduated from Stanford and then made about $20 million in salary in the 1990s. With his brother managing his money and his father available for advice on legal matters, the ballplayer did fine. But the number of parasites lurking around jocks is legion.
Meaning his parents intentionally held him back a year in K-8 school at some point so that he would start high school at 15 instead of 14. The reason you have to do this in K-8 (if you do it at all) is that once you enter high school, you generally are only allowed 4 years to play sports.
Moneyball Billy Beane was a mid-1st round draft pick while gay Billy Bean was a 4th round draft pick. Being a decent AAA player isn't bad for a 4th rounder, but disappointing for a first rounder. But by that standard, every single first rounder taken in Beane's year of 1980 was a disappointment, even #1 overall Darryl Strawberry is frequently referred to as a disappointment, although that's only relative to his Hall of Fame potential. He was a tremendous player for half of a decade or more.
Strawberry's mistake was going back to Los Angeles; being around his old friends was the death knell of his career, although he had a brief resurgence with the Yankees later in the decade.
The irony of that class of 1980 is that it produced no Hall of Fame players, but it did produce Terry Francona, who had a mediocre career as a player but may be inducted as a manager at some point. Strawberry, Kelly Gruber, Glenn Wilson, Tim Burke, Danny Tartabull, Eric Davis, and the late Darren Daulton were all All Stars.
Baseball drafts are not NBA/NHL/ NFL drafts. While being taken in a first round by the MLB has cache, its not a guarantee of anything and many wash out. That a 4th rounder would do better than a 1st rounder is common. Baseball players need seasoning.
Contrast that with the NBA/NHL/NFL draft, where guys taken in any other round besides the 1st are not expected to compete much for a starting job and just fill out rosters at best, while a 1st rounder is expected to immediately make the team and even start leading it right away, and the higher in the 1st round the more pressure to do so.
Tom Brady being taken so late in the draft (6th round) and becoming the GOAT QB is one of the great whiplashes in NFL history, but the reason being is just as I said: in the NFL/NHL/NBA, if you're not 1st round, you're forgotten.
I had no idea Rusty Staub was gay, is that generally acknowledged? He was a really really good player, not quite a borderline HOF case but close. 279 career homers, 2700 career hits, six time all star, in an era that wasn’t great for hitters.
Over at Steve's other blogs, we have had this discussion a few times, most recently when he passed. Steve never acknowledged our comments one way or the other, but he did say it was plausible. In the NYC area, it was an open secret that Rusty was gay.
No, but one year at Banner Day someone cleverly snuck "Rusty Aids the Mets" past the censors. In the 1973 team picture Rusty, who is standing in the back row, has his hands on the shoulders of Teddy Martinez, backup shortstop to Buddy Harrelson. No one else is posed this way.
Rusty lived to 73, which is not old age per se, but no one can say he died a young man. As an aside, Rusty liked the number 10 but when he first got traded to the Mets it was being worn by Duffy Dyer. Only when Dyer got traded to the Pirates could Rusty take back his rightful 10; he wore 4 in the interim, which is why you see him with that number in the 1973 playoffs.
Gays, however, will play a different big time stringed instrument: the piano. Elton John, Little Richard, some classical pianists. Likely gays gravitate towards it because their overbearing mothers like a well behaved goodboy who plays the piano at home and the organ at church.
Steve, I figured there would be a lot of gay baseball players, because most baseball players have taken a few balls to the chin. Nyuk nyuk nyuk! I'm old enough to recall when Rusty Staub was active, but I never knew he was gay. Perhaps it because I was a young teen and was a bit naive about such things. Enjoyed the article.
This is funny. Doesn't SAG have rules to prevent you from infringing on a similarly-named, more famous member? Kareem Abdul-Jabbar sued that Dolphins running back (tbf, who was also appropriating his #33)
Are you sure the two Billy Bean(e)s are “wholly different people”? Maybe they’re just partly different, even mostly different, but unless you have convincing evidence of a whole difference, I’ll have to give this assertion an “Unproven”
Because there aren't any. And there's a good reason for that.
Say you had a job where you were constantly in close physical contact some of the hottest women on earth, often hot and sweaty and naked or nearly so. Do you think you'd be able to focus on the job? That's what it's like for a homosexual male on the field or in the locker room.
Even if a gay had the talent to play ball there's no way he could compete in that environment.
If he had mediocre minor league talent, what--or who--did gay Bean do to be big league for 6 seasons?
Its a fair question and supposition. It could be he had a sexual "in" as it were that kept him around. But I tend to think it was what I call the "handling the road" ability.
Going on the road/constantly traveling for work is difficult. You get exhausted and worn down, you don't sleep well, etc. While it might be exciting at first, you become numb to each new city and town. As Steve probably might agree after his book tour, its fun for a while, but exhausting.
Add to that the temptations of a rich young celebrity ball player: groupies banging down your door nightly, luxurious food and drink, alcohol, club partying, other celebrities wanting to hang with you, drug dealers, gambling, interviews media fights, strip clubs, brothels, financial scammers, gold diggers, and people generally trying to scam you for everything else. Most guys can't handle it, get distracted and wash out. So athletes need to show not only that they can do the job at a major league level, but also that they can handle the pressures, depression, and distractions of the road as well; they are really 2 separate jobs, and pro athletes need to able to do both.
When you hear phrases like "crafty old veteran" or "veteran leadership" to explain why Team X just hired some jabroni guy with crap stats, understand he may be there to offer a calming influence on younger guys, yank them out of strip clubs before closing time so they can be rested for the game the next day, and himself be able to show up every day on the road and be able to give you consistent performance, even if subpar.
Gay Bean may just have been able to handle the road well enough to be kept around. Not being interested in sleeping with females likely helped a lot, and I've never heard of "gay groupies" for baseball, especially not during that time. Gambling is more of a straight male thing (higher T), Gay Bean probably kept the media at arms length to keep himself closeted, and so Gay Bean's distractions were minimized to drugs, alcohol, finance, and the wear and tear on the road. So teams likely kept him around for that.
Great perspective on "handling the road."
In addition, it seems fairer to say that Bean and Beane had "mediocre *major* league talent." If 60 Wins Above Replacement makes you Hall of Fame material, then the middle 68% of the curve must be bounded by -6 to +6 WAR. Or something. With career length factored in. Does anyone know?
Pre-MeToo'ed Garrison Keillor notwithstanding, all major leaguers can't be above average for a stat like WAR.
Edit: WAR distribution has to be quite skewed; much better players return next year while much worse players don't. For each season, average WAR must be zero, but over time, there should be many short-termers with modestly negative numbers balanced by fewer veterans who are solidly in the black.
The gay Crash Davis. Isn’t softball wildly popular with the gays?
Lesbians, not gay men. As Steve once wrote, lesbians tend to like playing competitive sports way more than gay men, who prefer activities that show off their bodies first. That's because both homosexual groups are trying to attract their own kind: women prefer men who are "winners" at something, especially sports, so lesbians try to win at sports, while men prefer their partners to be physically good looking, so gay men try to show off their bodies as sexually attractive, because a homerun hitting guy who's ugly is less a catch for a gay than a twink who looks like Justin Bieber.
> As a utility outfielder and first baseman (i.e., he couldn’t play key defensive positions)
This was because Gay Bean was a lefty, and the geometry of baseball prevents them from playing these positions
> their career statistics as ballplayers are weirdly similar, as I shall document below
I know you don't read the comments at your other blog, but I mentioned Gay Bean's passing over there. Ron Mexico and I had a spirited discussion about the two Bean(e)s, which I will reproduce below for those who missed it. For those who don't want to read it, my thesis was that Beane was a much larger flop as a player, mostly because he was much more hyped coming out of high school, turning down a scholarship from Stanford to sign with the New York Mets, while Gay Bean played for four seasons at Loyola Marymount.
ScarletNumber: August 6, 10:03 pm
O/T
In iSteve news, openly-gay baseball player Billy Bean died today at the age of 60. He had a 6-year career, mostly with the San Diego Padres. To be clear, this was NOT Moneyball Billy Beane. The irony is that Bean had a better playing career than Beane did, even though the latter was more hyped.
Ron Mexico: August 7, 12:39 pm
“better playing career”
BB (-2.0 WAR, 5 HR, .226 BA) vs. BBe (-1.6 WAR, 3 HR, .219 BA)
tomatoes, tomahtos
I noticed they were both Tigers in 1988. That must have been confusing to the casual fan.
ScarletNumber: August 8, 3:46 am
LOL I didn’t say that Bean had a MUCH better career, but he did play 272 games in his 6-year career, while Beane played 148. Bean als0 had an OPS of .574 while Beane’s was .543. However, as close as their statistics were, Beane was the much bigger flop, as he turned down a scholarship to Stanford in order to sign with the Mets. Then, adding insult to injury, Stanford revoked his admission completely!
In his playing career, Beane was most useful as trade bait, as it allowed the Mets to acquire Tim Teufel, who was their platoon second baseman for their 86 World Series and 88 NL East championship teams.
You are correct that they were both members of the 1988 Tigers, but they were not teammates as Beane played all of his games in April while Bean played all of his in September. Bean was on the team in 1987, though, so I’m sure that was confusing for fans. However, they were teammates on the 1988 Toledo Mud Hens, so I’m sure it was confusing when manager Pat Corrales had to send in his reports 🤣
Moneyball Beane might have been John Elway's successor as Stanford QB if he had accepted a football scholarship.
While he is two years younger than Elway, Elway had redshirted in middle school because his family moved so much (his father was a college football coach), so when Beane graduated high school Elway had just completed his freshman year at Stanford. This would have given Beane only one or two years as Stanford's starter.
Beane was so hyped as a baseball player that he was placed higher in the minors by the Mets than another one of their first-round selections that year, Darryl Strawberry. In the minors Beane roomed with Lenny Dykstra, who is a known meat head. One day in spring training the Mets were playing the Phillies and Steve Carlton was pitching and Dykstra had no idea who he was! Showing that ignorance is bliss, Dykstra proclaimed that he would have no problem facing Carlton, and he was correct, going 3-for-7 off of him in his career.
My friend's little brother was Elway's successor at Stanford, although in his one year as Stanford's starter he didn't make them forget Elway.
There's something to be said for going to a college where you'll get more than one year as a starter. Kurt Warner, for example, got stuck behind two other QBs in college for three years, got one year to start, was pretty good, but nobody noticed, and then he was stocking shelves.
I know you're not talking about him here, but were you a friend of Jack McDowell's family? He is an alumnus of Notre Dame HS in Sherman Oaks as well as Stanford, and he was eight years behind you at NDHS.
I was referring to a different family involving NDHS and Stanford, but, yes, I played basketball against the 15 year old Jack McDowell, and was absolutely destroyed trying to guard him.
Without mentioning their name, you wrote the following paragraph over at Blogspot 10 years ago and I had always assumed it was about the McDowells:
A problem that most black and many white pro athletes have is that they typically don’t have any nuclear family members that they can (reasonably) trust to manage their money for them. In contrast, a high school friend of mine, whose father was a respected lawyer, became a CPA. One of his younger brothers grew up to be a star baseball player who graduated from Stanford and then made about $20 million in salary in the 1990s. With his brother managing his money and his father available for advice on legal matters, the ballplayer did fine. But the number of parasites lurking around jocks is legion.
Redshirted?
Meaning his parents intentionally held him back a year in K-8 school at some point so that he would start high school at 15 instead of 14. The reason you have to do this in K-8 (if you do it at all) is that once you enter high school, you generally are only allowed 4 years to play sports.
Moneyball Billy Beane was a mid-1st round draft pick while gay Billy Bean was a 4th round draft pick. Being a decent AAA player isn't bad for a 4th rounder, but disappointing for a first rounder. But by that standard, every single first rounder taken in Beane's year of 1980 was a disappointment, even #1 overall Darryl Strawberry is frequently referred to as a disappointment, although that's only relative to his Hall of Fame potential. He was a tremendous player for half of a decade or more.
https://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/1980_Amateur_Draft
Strawberry's mistake was going back to Los Angeles; being around his old friends was the death knell of his career, although he had a brief resurgence with the Yankees later in the decade.
The irony of that class of 1980 is that it produced no Hall of Fame players, but it did produce Terry Francona, who had a mediocre career as a player but may be inducted as a manager at some point. Strawberry, Kelly Gruber, Glenn Wilson, Tim Burke, Danny Tartabull, Eric Davis, and the late Darren Daulton were all All Stars.
Baseball drafts are not NBA/NHL/ NFL drafts. While being taken in a first round by the MLB has cache, its not a guarantee of anything and many wash out. That a 4th rounder would do better than a 1st rounder is common. Baseball players need seasoning.
Contrast that with the NBA/NHL/NFL draft, where guys taken in any other round besides the 1st are not expected to compete much for a starting job and just fill out rosters at best, while a 1st rounder is expected to immediately make the team and even start leading it right away, and the higher in the 1st round the more pressure to do so.
Tom Brady being taken so late in the draft (6th round) and becoming the GOAT QB is one of the great whiplashes in NFL history, but the reason being is just as I said: in the NFL/NHL/NBA, if you're not 1st round, you're forgotten.
I had no idea Rusty Staub was gay, is that generally acknowledged? He was a really really good player, not quite a borderline HOF case but close. 279 career homers, 2700 career hits, six time all star, in an era that wasn’t great for hitters.
Over at Steve's other blogs, we have had this discussion a few times, most recently when he passed. Steve never acknowledged our comments one way or the other, but he did say it was plausible. In the NYC area, it was an open secret that Rusty was gay.
Did they call him "Rusty Stub?"
No, but one year at Banner Day someone cleverly snuck "Rusty Aids the Mets" past the censors. In the 1973 team picture Rusty, who is standing in the back row, has his hands on the shoulders of Teddy Martinez, backup shortstop to Buddy Harrelson. No one else is posed this way.
Rusty lived to 73, which is not old age per se, but no one can say he died a young man. As an aside, Rusty liked the number 10 but when he first got traded to the Mets it was being worn by Duffy Dyer. Only when Dyer got traded to the Pirates could Rusty take back his rightful 10; he wore 4 in the interim, which is why you see him with that number in the 1973 playoffs.
In sports, any man who throws or kicks a ball is highly unlikely to be gay.
Likewise in popular music, any man playing a stringed instrument is highly likely to like girls.
In office jobs I’ve found the same for guys who do stuff like forecasting the next quarter’s results.
Guys pickup guitars to get girls.
Gays, however, will play a different big time stringed instrument: the piano. Elton John, Little Richard, some classical pianists. Likely gays gravitate towards it because their overbearing mothers like a well behaved goodboy who plays the piano at home and the organ at church.
Steve, I figured there would be a lot of gay baseball players, because most baseball players have taken a few balls to the chin. Nyuk nyuk nyuk! I'm old enough to recall when Rusty Staub was active, but I never knew he was gay. Perhaps it because I was a young teen and was a bit naive about such things. Enjoyed the article.
This is funny. Doesn't SAG have rules to prevent you from infringing on a similarly-named, more famous member? Kareem Abdul-Jabbar sued that Dolphins running back (tbf, who was also appropriating his #33)
And who was that Dolphins running back with a similar name to KAJ?
Are you sure the two Billy Bean(e)s are “wholly different people”? Maybe they’re just partly different, even mostly different, but unless you have convincing evidence of a whole difference, I’ll have to give this assertion an “Unproven”
Gay Bean sounds like a coffee shop in the Castro.