William Daro "Billy" Bean (born May 11, 1964 in Santa Ana, California) is a former Major League Baseball player who made news in 1999 when he made his homosexuality public. Bean was an outfielder, and left-handed hitter, with 487 at bats with a .226 batting average in a career that lasted from 1987 through 1995: Detroit Tigers 1987-1989, Los Angeles Dodgers 1989, San Diego Padres 1993-1995. Bean tied a major league record with four hits in his first major league game. After acknowledging that he is gay, Bean went on to write a book, "Going the Other Way: Lessons from a life in and out of Major League Baseball". Bean is only the second former major league player to reveal his homosexuality; the late Los Angeles Dodger and Oakland Athletic Glenn Burke is the only other ex-player to have acknowledged his homosexuality. He was also a panelist on GSN's I've Got A Secret revival in 2006, and is a board member of the Gay and Lesbian Athletics Foundation. In the summer of 2007, it was announced that he had been hired as a consultant by Scout Productions, the team of David Collins and Michael Williams, who produced Bravo's Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, for their next project with Showtime entitled "The Beard". The project is a romantic comedy about a gay pro baseball player who enters into a relationship with a woman in order to survive in the sports world.
See also
External links
- Billy Bean.com
- Career statistics and player information from Baseball-Reference
- Baseball Library page
