Why Aren't There More Gay Baseball Players?

Two summers ago, two minor leaguers came out. Many expected more players to follow—they were wrong.

Baseball on Mound Safeco Field 2016
USA Today Sports

A baseball rests on top of the mound before a game between the Seattle Mariners and Chicago White Sox at Safeco Field. Seattle defeated Chicago, 6-5, in eleven innings.

Baseball on Mound Safeco Field 2016

Things really are getting better for gay professional athletes. Less than a decade ago, it was practically unthinkable for a gay athlete to come out in professional sports. Or for that matter, in one of the more visible college sports. But now look what’s happened in just the last few years.

In the spring of 2013, NBA veteran Jason Collins came out publicly; the next winter, he became the first openly gay player in one of the big four pro sports. Ultimately, Collins played in 22 games with the Brooklyn Nets before retiring. In August 2013, University of Missouri football player Michael Sam told his teammates he was gay. He came out publicly after his All-American season but before the NFL Draft. Sam was one of the last players selected in the 2014 draft, and eventually signed with two NFL teams but never played in a regular-season game. In 2015, he did become the first publicly gay player in Canadian Football League history.

Granted, there still hasn’t been an openly gay player in the NFL, NHL, or Major League Baseball. But since the summer of 2015, there have been two publicly gay players in baseball’s minor leagues.

Sean Conroy was the first.

Sean Conroy Sonoma Stompers 2016

On June 25 last year, Conroy—a crafty right-handed pitcher with the Sonoma Stompers of the independent Pacific Association—came out as gay. No active professional baseball player had done that before. Never ever.

Seven weeks later, on Aug. 15, Brewers farmhand David Denson, a 20-year-old first baseman in Class A, became the second (and the first affiliated with a major league organization) to make a public announcement about his sexuality, and invite the inevitable scrutiny.

The good news? By practically all accounts, both Conroy and Denson received full-throated support from their teammates, their employers, and the media.

“The reaction from my teammates very much surprised me,” Denson says. “Nothing negative at all. All those things you see publicly—with families, with the neglect of a son or daughter, the troubles kids have in school—I didn’t see any of that at all. My biggest concerns were about my family and my teammates. But when I came out, my teammates embraced it. Even guys who had been so anti-gay; they were like, ‘It’s still you. You’re the same person.’”

Conroy, who came out on the Stompers’ Pride Night, sounds much the same notes: “I’m just happy with the feedback we got; there weren’t any negative consequences.” Last September, the Hall of Fame added to its collection the official scoresheet and a signed lineup card from the first game Conroy played as an openly gay man.

In the previous 150 years, zero professional baseball players had come out as homosexual. Then all of a sudden, two did in less than two months, and the response seemed universally positive and wildly encouraging. So can you blame one for thinking that Conroy and Denson would be the first two of many? That the pace would pick up considerably? And that Major League Baseball would soon finally welcome its first publicly gay player? 

“Even if someone’s hearing all these positive stories about others coming out, it’s very difficult and complex. You just don’t know, and for some people it’s more scary than for others.”

Well, the complete list of professional baseball players who have come out since the middle of Aug. 2015 isn't really a list—because exactly zero players have followed Conroy and Denson's lead. That's amazing considering more than 8,000 men played in the affiliated minor leagues this past year, there are another roughly 2,000 in the independent leagues, and then there are hundreds of major leaguers who didn’t spend any time in the minors. That's well more than 10,000 and probably a bit south of 11,000 men who played some form of professional baseball in 2016. And nobody joined Conroy and Denson? Then again, it remains true that only a small number of players have come out publicly after their pro careers—four to be exact. And just one of those—onetime Cardinals farmhand Tyler Dunnington, last March—after Denson went public. Which further suggests just how distinct the stigma might be. Still, why on earth has nobody followed Conroy and Denson out of the closet and into the seemingly welcoming light?

Spoiler alert! There’s no single great answer to that question. Complex spoke to every living professional baseball player who’s come out publicly: Conroy and Denson, plus four others who came out after retiring, and all of them had somewhat different takes.

“I think people are misguided in thinking that it’s connected,” says Billy Bean, the one-time major leaguer who came out four years after his pro career ended and wrote a book about everything, now serving as Major League Baseball’s Ambassador for Inclusion. “It’s a very, very personal decision.”

Jason Burch, who pitched in the minors from 2003 through 2008 and came out publicly in 2015 (after telling teammates seven years earlier, by the way), basically agrees with Bean: The equation just isn’t as simple as we might like. “The real issue is whether or not coming out will create a state of happiness,” Burch says, “and for many athletes that is not a straightforward matter.”

“I can understand why players are not doing it,” Bean tells Complex. “Sure, you might have somebody like David [Denson], who was ready and said, ‘This will make me a better player.’ But a young player has to know it will create a distraction, initially.”

MLB On Deck Circle Mets 2016

Tyler Dunnington’s personal journey is unlike any other. A pitcher in the Cardinals’ farm system, Dunnington heard some terribly bigoted comments from teammates and one coach during the 2014 season. The next winter, Dunnington says, “I was training with my dad and wondering, why am I not excited? Why am I sick to my stomach when I think about going to spring training?”

“It was January,” he continued, “about a month before I would have left for spring training, and I was just thinking to myself, ‘You’re extremely unhappy right now. How do we change that? You need to come out.’ The only thing I could think of was to come out. But I didn’t think I could do it and still play baseball.”

So Dunnington told the Cardinals he wasn’t showing up to spring training. Then he told his parents he was gay. “I come from a small area,” he tells Complex, “and I assumed the people I was around would not be accepting. But they were, 100 percent [supportive]. Who’s to say if I were to come out [while still playing], that it wouldn’t have been a positive experience? But it’s hard enough. It’s a grind already.”

Last March, when most of his former teammates were getting ready for another season, Dunnington came out publicly in an article on Outsports, a website dedicated to the coverage of LGBT issues in sports.

Conroy—who, it’s perhaps worth reiterating, is the first active player in the history of professional baseball to come out publiclyhas a unique take. “Maybe people saw it wasn’t a big deal,” he says, “one way or another. I almost think if there was more of a controversy, more guys would be inclined to come out as a show of support.”

Maybe. Still, Conroy is surprised nobody else has come along since him and Denson.  

John Dillinger, who pitched in the minors from 1992 through 2005 and came out publicly in 2012, feels the same way.

“I’m very surprised,” Dillinger says, “because both of those guys [Conroy and Denson] have been supported so much, including by their teammates. Sean Conroy’s in the Hall of Fame, right?”

“What you do in your private time is your business. We don’t care; that’s your private life. But if you choose to make it public, that becomes you instead of the team.”

For all the progress that’s been made, perhaps due as much to generational changes as anything else, Dunnington’s experiences just two years ago suggest there’s still an unhealthy stigma working against players coming out, whether just to their teammates or to the wider world. But for some gay athletes, their decision might simply be a matter of wanting to be what they think is a "good" teammate.

For one straight veteran major-league pitcher, someone who’s considered one of the game’s good guys but wished to remain anonymous, gay players don’t speak up because of “the culture of the clubhouse.”

“What you do in your private time is your business,” he says. “We don’t care; that’s your private life. But if you choose to make it public, that becomes you instead of the team. Right now I’m in a great clubhouse, maybe the best I’ve ever seen, and no one is doing anything to bring attention to themselves. Maybe in the off-season, it wouldn’t be any big deal. But during the season, when you get in the clubhouse culture, it’s mostly about ‘What can I do to help this team win?’”

Bean backed up the anonymous major leaguer’s take: “If you’re an active player, it’s going to be news. You start getting attention for things that are happening off the field. You’re not there to get attention for your personal life.”

Ultimately, one might conclude that the connection between Conroy and Denson was fairly tenuous, and that the temporal proximity of their comings-out was largely an accident. Conroy was the right man in the right place at the right time, and Denson seems to have felt what now seems an exceptionally rare compulsion—personal, yes, but also professional—to be honest about his sexuality with the whole world. “It was all very scary, very nerve-racking,” Denson says now. “I felt damned if I did, damned if I didn’t. My emotional state was horrible. I just had no one I could talk to. But once I got in touch with Billy [Bean], everything got a lot better.”

For many years, few people have paid more attention to sports-related LGBT issues than Jim Buzinski, who co-founded Outsports. “No, I’m never surprised any more. It’s a lot harder than people assume for professional athletes to come out.”

Okay, one more question: If there’s no publicly gay major leaguer in 2016, when will there be?

“I’ve been doing this for 16 years,” Buzinski says, “and there’s been a lot of waiting. I don’t know if it’s going to happen anytime soon. And when it does, it might be a time and a player we least expected.”

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