BABE RUTH? IS THAT A DOUBLE ENTENDRE? :

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. (King Kaufman, May 23, 2002, Salon)

In Philadelphia on Tuesday, before the Mets' first game following the release of Valentine's comments, the press pounced on Piazza, a Mets star who spends a lot of time with pretty models in clubs -- not to mention his creative facial hair, if you know what I mean, eh, boys? "I'm not gay," Piazza said.

Everyone: Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Piazza said he agrees with Valentine. "In this day and age, it's irrelevant," he said. "I don't think it would be a problem at all."

Well, of course it would be a problem. It would be a problem for the player who came out, or was outed. Ask Bean, who put the word out that he would like to have a front-office job and hasn't exactly been inundated with offers, or ask the first openly gay major league player, Glenn Burke, who said, before he died of AIDS complications in 1995 after years of drug addiction and living on the streets, that he was hounded out of baseball in the early '80s because of his sexuality.

It's been frequently noted that American team-sports locker rooms are centers of Neanderthal thinking, homophobia, misogyny, the whole business. Even in that world, baseball players are a conservative lot, suspicious of outsiders and wary of change. Valentine and Piazza are either being naive or overly optimistic by saying that a gay player would have no problem.

Forget the other players--imagine the fans. At the Boston Garden last weekend, fans chanted "Wife Beater" at Jason Kidd. Then at the Meadowlands in mid-week someone had a banner saying "Stab Pierce Again"--a reference to Celtics star Paul Pierce being stabbed outside a nightclub. "Fan", we would do well to recall, is derived from fanatic. Fans don't actually care what it is that makes a guy from another team different, they just grab it and run with it.

It's also worth recalling that Jackie Robinson was chosen to break the color barrier not just because of his physical ablity, which was considerable, but because Branch Rickey believed him to be capable of performing at a high level even amidst a barrage of hatred from fans and other players. The first openly gay player had better be just as gifted a player and just as tough mentally, because imagine what people will say if he crumbles under the pressure.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 31, 2002 3:06 PM