Five years after his sudden and tearful retirement, Mike Schmidt became a first-ballot Hall of Famer. | Gregory Fisher-USA TODAY Sports

Welcome back to Talkin’ Gaysball where sometimes we just want to use Adele for our walk-up song.

I’m a massive empath. So this week, when I watched Tom Daley choking up with emotion while announcing his retirement, I also got a little misty about never participating in competitive diving again.

This despite the fact that the most athletic move I would pull off on the 10 meter platform would be sprinting down the stairs at Sha’Carri-level velocity to get as far away from it as humanly possible.

Daley’s interview took me back to one of a surprising memory of emotional empathy from my baseball childhood: the sudden retirement of Phillies Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt.

As baseball-mad kid, I always thought of Schmidt as an emotionless cyborg who had one permanent setting: crush Chicago Cubs pitching. 

Watching Schmidt mash homer after homer onto Waveland Avenue made him seem like Skynet had programmed a Terminator specifically for my pennant hopes. When I spoke his name, it was with a mixture of awe and fear.

But after offseason shoulder surgery led Schmidt to uncharacteristically flail away for the first two months of the 1989 season, he shocked all of baseball by announcing that he would retire immediately in the middle of a road trip in May.

During a hastily arranged news conference, Schmidt began reading a prepared statement and repeatedly paused while attempting to keep his emotions in check.

Then when he spoke of the start of his professional journey, something happened that was gobsmacking to my 10-year-old self as I watched the footage on SportsCenter.

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Schmidt managed to get out “Some 18 years ago, I left Dayton, Ohio with two very bad knees…and a dream to become a Major League Baseball player…” before dissolving into open weeping before my very eyes. He then uttered “I thank God that dream came true” in a voice choked with emotion before having to step away.

At that time in my childhood, I was a crier. And as a queer little boy in the 1980s who was so emotional that I broke out sobbing at everything from losing in tug-of-war to Phil Collins ballads to honest-to-god “Ernest Goes to Camp,” I took a lot of crap from my peers.

The message the other kids sent was unmistakable: I was a boy and crying was unacceptable.

But here was Mike Schmidt — an inner circle all time great baseball player who struck fear into the hearts of even the most dominant pitchers and who crushed 548 career home runs — crying openly for the entire country to see.

It wasn’t a life changing moment by any stretch. I’d still get frustrated and cry at school and all the other boys would make fun of me.

However, it was a rare moment where a baseball player let me see that crying was a normal and acceptable response when you’re sad. 

Schmidt provided a glimpse of humanity in baseball during a time when, like every other masculine icon of the Reagan era, ballplayers were supposed to be either stoic or angry. It was one of the few times where it felt like the game was telling me that it was OK to be myself, my feelings were valid, and that even all time greats sometimes had the same emotions I had.

Daley’s tearful retirement announcement 35 years later evoked many of those same thoughts. Outside of this particular intersection of their Venn diagrams, there aren’t many ways in which you can compare a grizzled old straight baseball legend from four decades ago to a present-day out gay Olympic diver.

But what I didn’t realize about crying when I was an emo little kid was that it unites all of us in shared humanity — even sports icons. And it turns out that’s a very good thing.

MLB Thirst Trap of the Week

Speaking of crying…

The 2024 White Sox.

The South Siders have endured 21 and 14-game losing streaks. They went 27 days between wins. And they are currently on pace to break the all-time record for losses in a season.

To say the Pale Hose have been bleak is a massive understatement. Their year has played out as if their schedule was planned by Eli Roth and their game stories were written by Cormac McCarthy.

There’s not a lot I can say to help Sox fans, especially since the Jerry Reinsdorf reboot of “Succession” shows no end in sight. But there is one saving grace.

After firing comically overmatched manager Pedro Grifol, the Sox replaced him with longtime MLB Thirst Trap All-Star Grady Sizemore. Let’s just say that his abilities in this particular department have not eroded.

Na na na na, hey hey hey, kiss him…
Credit: Kamil Krzaczynski-USA TODAY Sports

For the rest of the season, White Sox fans will get to stare at this certified smokeshow every time he goes to remove a struggling pitcher. Which means they’re guaranteed to see him a minimum of seven times a game.