Burke was drafted by the Dodgers while still in college and made his first major league at-bat for the team in 1976. He started two games in the 1977 National League Championship Series and also started Game 1 of that year's World Series for the Dodgers. He's even credited with developing the famed "high five" hand slap following a home run by teammate Dusty Baker.
While playing gay baseball.
Download: https://tinurll.com/2vJgNS
The A's team of this period was terrible, managed by the aging and washed-up Billy Martin. Burked gained little playing time and faced open hostility from Martin who called him a "f*gg*t" and worse in front of his teammates in the locker room. A knee injury sent him down to the minor leagues and out of professional baseball entirely a short time later.
A few gay pro baseball players have come out after their careers ended, but none while playing Major League Baseball or in the minors, according to the Stompers, an independent minor league team unaffiliated with MLB or its farm system.
Ruby has been playing ball since the age of 6. He graduated from Vassar College in 2019 and plays third baseman and outfielder for the Salem-Keizer Volcanoes in Oregon. He is currently the only active professional baseball player to come out as gay. His love for the sport is only matched by his love for the community and country music. He is also the co-founder of the advocacy organization Proud to Be in Baseball.
Based on pre-mid-20th-century data, the same photoperiod-related birth seasonality previously observed in schizophrenia was also recently found in neural-tube defects and in extreme left-handedness among professional baseball players. This led to a hypothesis implicating maternal melatonin and other mediators of sunlight actions capable of affecting 4th-embryonic-week developments including neural-tube closure and left-right differentiation of the brain. Here, new studies of baseball players suggest that the same sunlight actions could also affect testosterone-dependent male-female differentiation in the 4-month-old fetus. Independently of hand-preferences, baseball players (n=6829), and particularly the stronger hitters among them, showed a unique birth seasonality with an excess around early-November and an equally significant deficit 6 months later around early-May. In two smaller studies, north-American and other northern-hemisphere born lesbians showed the same strong-hitter birth seasonality while gay men showed the opposite seasonality. The sexual dimorphism-critical 4th-fetal-month testosterone surge coincides with the summer-solstice in early-November births and the winter-solstice in early-May births. These coincidences are discussed and a "melatonin mechanism" is proposed based on evidence that in seasonal breeders maternal melatonin imparts "photoperiodic history" to the newborn by direct inhibition of fetal testicular testosterone synthesis. The present effects could represent a vestige of this same phenomenon in man.
Right now, Ruby is focused on baseball. He's excited about the opportunity to play for the Unicorns and be an LGBTQ baseball ambassador building visibility and taking Proud To Be In Baseball's mission to European baseball players and coaches.
"I get to bring our charity around the world and meet players and talk to them," he said, adding that baseball is huge in Europe. He's already spoken with some pro and minor league teams after games about being gay in baseball. "This trip was an opportunity to maximize impact on a global scale and do some really cool stuff. It's very fulfilling to be able to do this."
Baseball is gaining popularity globally. Ruby has played baseball professionally in Austria, Chile, Germany, Guatemala, and Peru, prior to playing for the Unicorns. He also coached a youth team in Cuba.
"Bates coming out is great for baseball. For our sport to become more inclusive, we need to have out and proud players confident that they can get a job at all levels of the game," said Ruby, congratulating Bates on coming out and joining the Sioux City Explorers. "Each one of us that comes out helps to further tear down the antiquated belief that queer people can't play sports, in our case male team sports."
Ruby started playing baseball when he was about 7 years old. His father, who was a pro baseball player, told him stories and put his first bat into his hands. Ruby fell in love with the game, but he spent much of his teens and professional life in the closet. Like his mentor and friend Bean, Ruby feared having to choose between his love of baseball and living openly with the love of his life, Max. (Ruby only identified his boyfriend by his first name to protect his privacy.)
Ruby carefully planned his public coming out for five years. He heeded Bean's and others' warnings. He studied the past and current climate in baseball. He took note of reactions to each of his coming out experiences, first privately and then professionally.
"Any player who happens to be gay and is a professional and has kept that secret, they just want to be judged for their baseball or football or basketball ability. David would not be playing professional baseball if he wasn't an excellent baseball player," Bean told the Journal Sentinel.
The 25-year-old athlete took to Instagram to reveal to his followers that he is no longer playing for the Richmond Flying Squirrels, part of the San Francisco Giants system, and to thank his former team for the time he had with them. He then also took the opportunity to come out to all his fans and shared a powerful message.
Messages like the one shared by Bates are still so important in the male sports field, given that it is still an environment infused with homophobia that too often forces LGBTQ+ athletes to quit or to remain closeted while playing. 2ff7e9595c
Comments