Critics have generally viewed Take Me Out as a heartfelt work that is clearly knowledgeable about both the game of baseball and what it is to be public about homosexuality in the United States of the twenty-first century; still, most critics have tempered their support for the play by expressing discomfort about Greenberg's two-dimensional handling of characters, particularly Shane, while giving other characters verbal abilities that seem quite unlikely to be found among ballplayers.

Some reviewers had nothing but praise for the play when it ran on Broadway in 2002. For instance, David Kaufman, writing in Nation, starts his review with a brief overview of how far theater has come in portraying gay issues onstage since the 1960s, determining that Take Me Out “is indeed one of the best gay plays in years,” noting that “Greenberg seamlessly ties together matters of sex, race, multiculturalism, politics, political correctness...