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Baseball Primer Newsblog — The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand Tuesday, October 19, 2021Glenn Burke, baseball’s first openly gay player, to be subject of Netflix series produced by Jamie Lee Curtis, Ryan Murphy
RoyalsRetro (AG#1F)
Posted: October 19, 2021 at 10:48 AM | 13 comment(s)
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1. Walt Davis Posted: October 19, 2021 at 05:44 PM (#6047543)He got traded to Oakland who did give him a brief run starting in 1978. When he first got there, they stuck him in the lineup for 11 games, he hit 250/267/364 then got hurt (I assume). When he came back he got 10 starts in 14 games, hitting 235/316/294, but he had lost the starting CF job to Joe Wallis who had a well-timed hot streak.
Coincidentally enough, Joe Wallis (a former Cub "prospect") was also out of baseball after 1979 at the age of 28 (except for a brief stint in Mexico 3 years later). They make a somewhat interesting comp:
GB minors: 293/339/421
JW minors: 256/351/436
GB majors: 556 PA, 237/270/291, 52 OPS+, -2.4 WAR
JW majors: 996 PA, 244/317/359, 88 OPS+, -1 WAR
The main difference is that the not-good 76 Cubs gave Wallis a couple of months to prove himself (moving Rick Monday to 1B) while the division-winning 77 Dodgers did not give Burke 2 months of starting (coincidentally sticking with Rick Monday in CF).
Sort of fascinating how connected these careers are. Monday had been the A's CF through 1971. He was traded to the Cubs for Ken Holtzman. After the 1972 season, the Cubs traded prospect Bill North (who they never really gave a chance) to the A's. The Cubs shifted Monday to first so they could play Wallis in 1976. That offseason the Cubs traded Monday to the Dodgers where he "blocked" Burke in 1977. Early in 1978, the Dodgers traded Burke to the A's for Bill North. In Oakland, Burke starts for a couple of weeks then gets hurt. Shortly after that, the Cubs trade Wallis (who'd gotten off to a hot start) to the A's where he takes over CF and stays reasonably hot while Burke is out. Burke doesn't do much in his first 2 weeks back (mostly in LF and RF while Wallis was in CF) and goes to the bench. Burke and Wallis both do terribly for the 79 A's in limited time and never play again. Burke is 26, Wallis 27.
"Perhaps the most defining aspect of Burke’s biography is that he was the first major-league player to come out as gay to teammates, coaches, and team ownership. He talked about it with reporters, though none were willing to write about it in the late 1970s."
apropos here, perhaps: the British tabloids went gaga in the mid-1990s over what they speculated could be the "first all-lesbian Wimbledon semifinal matches."
but in the U.S., only Martina was gay - if you base it on what appeared in print and on TV, at least. I don't even think some of her peers would have minded talking about the topic, but the American press was squeamish. of course, Martina was just too big a star to be locked into a closet unless she wanted to be (and she could have been, here).
The Double Life of a Gay Dodger, Inside Sports, October 1982
Re: tennis, I think it’s better when the press doesn’t speculate about a person’s sexuality, to be honest.
I took neither to be intentionally hostile approaches.
not sure what Burke preferred, but even if he was eager to make his background known, it might have been difficult to find a taker in the mainstream media in that era and there was no internet of course.
side note: the top 100 or so media members in NJ all knew that Gov. McGreevey was gay almost two decades ago, but there was no sentiment of "wow, this will sell some papers, let's get the word out!" so it didn't happen.
it only got complicated when he hired a, well, overnight traveling companion male to a top security post in the wake of 9-11 for which he was unqualified. the ethics challenge was of outing him in the course of an investigation, or keeping that private.
much of the push was that if the traveling companion hired to a top security post back then was female, traditional media would have felt compelled to report on how odd the hire was based on credentials. but if male, then no reporting?
ultimately McGreevey realized that the dam was going to break at some point, hence the "I am a gay American" press conference gambit - which in retrospect worked rather well as a misdirection.
(postscript: McGreevey has since spent much of his life working with incarcerated people trying to transition back to regular life. there's a time period of wondering if it's just a PR stunt - but he exceeded that by a number of years. I believe it to be a legit transformation.)
Over a couple years he hit 294/330/437 in AAA. A few years later in that park Mike Marshall (not the pitcher) hit .373 with 34 homers, then Greg Brock hit .310 with 44.
But Inside Sports did a big long article on it in 1982? There's nothing about 1982 that would have made people "more willing" to write about it than they were in 1978 or 1979. That's silly and ahistorical. Fake history.
lindsay graham says 'oh, my'. it worked about as well as kevin spacey's "coming out"
Which was awkward, at best.
If Glenn Burke was indeed open about his sexuality in 1978, that was extremely courageous of him. Even today, gay pro athletes coming out is still very much the exception -- and the cultural atmosphere is far less repressive today.
The fact that Burke was a marginal prospect who didn't do well when he got a chance to play made it easy to dismiss him, but I wonder what the story would have been if he'd been a solid/not-great player, like, say, Bill North.
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