Major League Baseball: 1, Fox Sports: 0
Major League Baseball named former player Billy Bean as its first “Ambassador for Inclusion” — a post designed to counter homophobia and encourage diversity on and off the field — before Tuesday night’s All-Star Game, then watched as Fox Sports excluded the news from their four-plus hours of game coverage.
As reported here yesterday, the family of Glenn Burke, who died of AIDS in 1995 after a baseball career likely cut short by anti-gay bias, was invited to the All Star Game in Minneapolis to highlight a renewed effort by MLB stamp out homophobia in the game. The naming of Billy Bean, himself a gay former player who came out after he retired, to the new ambassador post was meant to show baseball and its fans that the league was serious about its official policy of nondiscrimination.
A major focus of Bean's work with the League will be to help end homophobia in the locker rooms, front offices, on the fields and in the stands. Bean will visit all 30 MLB teams within the next year and talk with players, coaches and front-office executives about steps they can take to end homophobia in their ball clubs. He will also be tasked with building partnerships and developing a complete program that will make baseball a model for LGBT inclusion.
"It's ironic that I am returning to baseball to help erase the same reason I left," Bean told Outsports in an exclusive interview. Bean left baseball in 1995 shortly after his then-partner passed away. Bean skipped his partner's funeral to play in a game for the Padres, lest someone discover he was gay.
"I was a young man, so confused and hurting inside trying to juggle a life of deception, and play in the major leagues while in the closet. The greatest mistake of my life was my own inability to believe or trust that I could reach out to someone and ask for some help. It was a different time, and for many of us, it wasn't easy. However, the hard work of so many brave people that came before me and during the past decade is paying dividends. Now we have arrived at this important moment."
But if baseball really wants to get the word out, Bean and his staff are going to need to visit the broadcast booth, as well.
Call me naïve, but, before the game, there was no doubt in my mind that this announcement and the presence of Burke’s family would at least rate a mention — or maybe even a full segment — during the four-hour Fox Sports All-Star Game gabfest. I mean, it wasn’t like announcers Joe Buck, Harold Reynolds, Tom Verducci and Ken Rosenthal didn’t stray from their scintillating play-by-play to discuss other peripheral developments (like it being Commissioner Bud Selig’s last ASG or NL starting pitcher Adam Wainwright’s comments that he tossed Derek Jeter a big fat lollipop to start the game).
But instead: [crickets]
To be fair … if that’s what you’d call this … Major League Baseball and the Players Association also made an announcement that, in light of the recent death of Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn from oral cancer, they hoped the use of smokeless tobacco among professional baseball players disappears.
“We give the players the opportunity to make the decision they're going to make against the backdrop of it being legal. At the end of the day, we don't condone it and they know we don't condone it," [said MLB commissioner Bud Selig].
"It will be a subject they'll discuss during the next collective bargaining," Selig said. "I understand that individuals have a right to make their own decisions. I hope we're successful, because the Tony Gwynn story was a heartbreaking, awful story.”
Hmm, well, to be really fair, hopes that it will be discussed during the next union contract negotiations — the current agreement expires in 2016 — is not the same as a definitive announcement, is it? So, maybe a bad analogy. (Or maybe linking tobacco use with cancer is another thing the broadcast didn’t want to do.)
But the presence of Glenn Burke’s family and the announcement of Bean’s appointment were concrete things, and a big enough deal to garner the attention of the national media (the front page of the New York Times site, for instance) — why did it not rate the attention of Fox Sports?
Without a single active baseball player or coach ever feeling comfortable enough to publicly come out as gay, Bean already looked to have his work cut out for him. When his appointment isn’t considered worthy of inclusion in a national broadcast of the only baseball game played that day, it appears the new job is even harder — and more necessary — than it seemed.
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