Dodgers News: Pride Night will be Missing one of its Key Proponents

LOS ANGELES — As the Los Angeles Dodgers celebrate Pride Night at Dodger Stadium this year, the occasion feels more poignant than ever. It’s the first since the passing of Billy Bean (not to be confused with Billy “Moneyball” Beane, who is still very much with us). Bean, the former Dodgers outfielder and trailblazing MLB executive became one of baseball’s most courageous advocates for inclusion and LGBTQ+ rights. Bean died last summer in August 2024 at the age of 60, after a battle with acute myeloid leukemia, leaving behind a legacy that transcends the field.

Bean’s playing career was relatively modest—Bean appeared in just 272 major league games across parts of six seasons with the Tigers, Dodgers, and Padres. For the Dodgers, it was a “blink-and-you’ll-miss-him” tenure. Acquired mid-season from the Tigers for Steve Green and Domingo Michel in July of 1989, Bean appeared in Dodger blue for just 76 plate appearances spread over 51 games. And while his numbers were not exactly earth shattering (.197/.250/.254 with three RBI), he contributed to a team that struggled to replicate the magic of the previous season. That year, the Dodgers finished a distant fourth, 14 games behind the first-place Giants. After his time with the Dodgers, he hung around the league a bit before finally retiring in the mid-90s.

However, his post-retirement work changed the face of the game. When he was named MLB’s first Ambassador for Inclusion in 2014, and later its senior vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion, he took on the responsibility of helping the sport grow in compassion, acceptance, and awareness.

“He made baseball a better institution,” said Commissioner Rob Manfred at the time of his death, “both on and off the field, by the power of his example, his empathy, his communication skills, his deep relationships inside and outside our sport, and his commitment to doing the right thing.”

That commitment was forged in solitude and pain. Bean played nine seasons of professional baseball hiding who he was from teammates and coaches, terrified of the repercussions of coming out in a sport that had no openly gay active players at the time. After years of silence and secrecy—including a marriage to a woman and a long-term relationship with a man that he kept hidden—Bean walked away from the game in 1995, exhausted not by the grind of the majors but by the toll of hiding his true self.

“For nine years, I felt like I had one foot in the major leagues and one foot on a banana peel,” Bean once told The New York Times. That fracture—between the man he was and the player he had to pretend to be—was unsustainable. “I’d finally achieved the sense of security and stability I lacked while I was locked in the big-league closet,” he later wrote in his 2003 memoir Going the Other Way. “There was no way I could go back to hiding.”

Born in Santa Ana, California, in 1964, Bean’s path to the majors followed a familiar arc for Southern California talent. He starred at Santa Ana High School and earned a scholarship to Loyola Marymount, where he hit over .400. Drafted by the Tigers in the fourth round in 1986, he debuted with a four-hit game in 1987. A stint with the Dodgers in 1989 brought him back home, but the pressure to conform—to present a straight identity—only intensified in one of baseball’s highest-profile clubhouses.

“My confusion was hard to shake, even at the ballpark, which had always been my sanctuary,” he wrote. “I would stand in center field, my every move scrutinized by 40,000 screaming fans, worrying about my parents’ reaction to the inevitable tabloid headlines about the queer ballplayer.”

After the 1995 season and the death of his partner, Sam Madani, from AIDS-related complications, Bean quietly exited the game. He came out publicly in 1999 and, in doing so, gave voice to what had once been unspeakable in professional baseball. He later said he only wished he hadn’t felt so alone.

“I went to Hooters, laughed at the jokes, lied about dates because I loved baseball. I still do. I’d go back in a minute. I only wish I hadn’t felt so alone, that I could have told someone, and that I hadn’t always felt God was going to strike me dead,” he told The Times.

Bean’s second act was nothing short of historic. As MLB’s inclusion ambassador, he visited clubhouses, led education efforts on LGBTQ+ issues, and spearheaded the league’s support of anti-bullying initiatives like Spirit Day. For closeted players, for queer youth who loved the game, and for a sport long stuck in a hypermasculine culture, he offered both a voice and a safe haven.

He never played in a major league game as an out gay man. But he made it possible for others to imagine that one day they could.

His visibility mattered deeply in Los Angeles, where both he and Glenn Burke—a fellow Dodger and the first major league player known to be gay—had struggled in silence decades apart. While Burke’s sexuality was an open secret that ended his career early, Bean’s was a tightly held one that nearly destroyed him emotionally. Together, their stories helped build the foundation for baseball’s evolving efforts toward equality.

Pride Night at Dodger Stadium is no longer a novelty. It’s an annual celebration of inclusion, identity, and the many faces of Dodgers fandom. But it is also a time to remember those who made it possible—not just by being loud and proud, but by surviving in silence and later using their voices to transform the culture of the sport.

In 2016, wearing a “We Are Orlando” shirt with rainbow lettering, Bean threw out a ceremonial first pitch in the wake of the Pulse nightclub shooting. That moment—both solemn and defiant—showed how far he had come and how far baseball still had to go.

As fans gather tonight beneath the lights at Chavez Ravine, watching the Dodgers take the field in rainbow accents and celebrating love in all its forms, Billy Bean’s spirit will be there too. Not just in memory, but in every young person who sees a future for themselves in baseball—on the field, in the stands, or anywhere the game is played.

Billy Bean didn’t just come out. He came back—to help baseball do better, be better, and love better. And for that, Dodger fans—and the game itself—owes him more than applause. It owes him thanks.

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