With the 2024 baseball regular season coming to a close, tributes to Billy Bean and his work in support of making the game a more LGBTQ-inclusive industry are still pouring in.
Major League Baseball recently held a Celebration of Life ceremony for Bean featuring eulogies from luminaries like Commissioner Rob Manfred, as well as Bean’s longtime friend and former teammate Brad Ausmus.
Also among those paying sincere respects are several players who Bean worked with after ignominious incidents of public homophobia. Their words provided an insight into Bean’s methods for attempting to make the game a more welcoming and open minded space.
In 2017, then-Blue Jays outfielder Kevin Pillar spat out an antigay slur after being quick-pitched. Pillar was suspended for two games. Shortly afterward, Bean reached out to educate him about the slur he used and why it was so hurtful to the gay community.
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Thanks to their shared experience in professional baseball, the two also began a friendship that lasted until Bean’s death this summer.
As Pillar recounted to The Athletic’s Sam Blum and Ken Rosenthal:
“Through what I did and what I experienced, it kind of led me to him. I wish I could have met him under different circumstances. You live and you learn in this game. I was fortunate to have gotten to know him and [he became] someone I could call a friend. He’s definitely a big loss for the game.”
Pillar’s words of tribute illustrated two key facets of how Bean approached his mission: emphasizing the common ground he had with his fellow players and using that to establish a long-term friendship with them.
It was clear that Bean believed players like Pillar could change if they could make a gay friend and use that relationship to open their mind about his life experience. It’s why Bean spent so much of his professional career telling the story of his playing days.
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Current Astros closer Josh Hader first encountered Bean after Hader’s long-buried homophobic and racist tweets went viral during his appearance in the 2018 All Star Game. His memories of that encounter further illustrated how Bean approached his work.
“He really wanted to learn about how I grew up,” Hader told The Athletic, “I was able to talk to him and how he went through the game of baseball in his time, being gay and not being able to be himself around the clubhouse. And how that made him feel.”
When Bean met with a player like Hader, he didn’t want to dominate the entire conversation with his life story, harrowing as it was. In order to make a connection, Bean felt it was important to listen to the player’s background as well in order to build a foundation for connection.
That extra work and sense of shared humanity was part of the reason players like Pillar and Hader remembered Bean so fondly after his death, despite their homophobic transgressions that brought them together in the first place.
“He really opened the game of baseball up. As a human, he was a great person. Very easy to talk to. Just getting to know one another was the easiest part,” Hader said.
To be sure, Bean’s views about active players coming out remained stuck in the 1990s era in which he played. As if to illustrate that, even with the work Bean put in to make the game a better place, there are no gay players stepping in to take his job after his death.
The Athletic’s report indicated that MLB has promoted executives April Brown and Michael Hill to Senior Vice President positions similar to Bean’s role. Blum and Rosenthal also wrote that MLB will look to retired players like CC Sabathia and Albert Pujols to connect with current players in crisis.
While both Sabathia and Pujols are highly respected throughout the game, both are straight and cannot speak firsthand to the experience of LGBTQ players in a baseball clubhouse.
Though Bean wasn’t a perfect ambassador for our community, his work with players like Pillar and Hader still went a long way toward helping baseball take strides to become a more inclusive game.
His absence leaves a void and it’s up to baseball to keep making those strides so that its next LGBTQ leader can emerge.
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