The backlash, such as it is, is confined to online comment sections. “You just lost a supporter,” the first comment on the Stompers’ Facebook post about Pride Night says. “See ya!” Pressed by other users, the lost supporter explains himself, saying, “when has Sonoma or the stompers celebrated Straight identity, Straight couples, or Straight pride? Never!!! Don’t sit there and tell me I’m being hateful. I’m just saying the truth!” He’s not the only commenter who speaks up for the straights. “Hmmmm, wonder if there’s gonna be a Heterosexual night for the rest of the players on this team Not being recognized,” muses one woman, who notes that she’s “definitely not homophobic.” She continues, “My reaction is to management & how they are trying to promote one individual player to try & line their own pockets!! This year has definitely been disappointing with a few aspects on the field as well as management decisions. If this year ends with the current disappointment, its sad that I will no longer be a supporter.”
Using the official Stompers account, Theo responds, “We celebrated heterosexual night with 6-STRAIGHT wins to start the season.” The Stompers, at this point, are 15-3, having followed up the 6-1 start with another impressive 9-2 run. We’ve averaged 7 runs per game and allowed barely half that many. Our starters have thrown the first two complete-game shutouts in our franchise’s history, our bullpen has a 2.27 ERA, and Feh, Daniel Baptista, and Matt Hibbert have been the three most productive hitters in the league. I feel the frustration of Phillies GM Ruben Amaro, who weeks earlier whined about fans who “bitch and complain” and “don’t understand the game.” At least Amaro had earned it: The Phillies were in last place. We’re setting records here, and people are worried about whether we’re properly honoring our other twenty-one players for wanting to have sex with women.
In the days before Pride Night, many local and even national outlets pick up Sean’s story. More coverage means more comments. “I found myself reading the comments and then answering those hateful comments the next time I had an interview,” Sean tells Sam. “When that question got asked to me I answered it in a way that would answer it to them. Like, people that would say that I was just looking for my fifteen minutes of fame, that I just wanted to come out to get the attention, which is wrong in a couple different ways. I don’t want the attention, nor is the coming-out part new.” Angry Internet commenters rarely respond to reason, which makes them immune to Sean’s tactical thinking. But most strangers are supportive, like the man in Minnesota who mails Sean a custom Stompers baseball card.
If anyone on the Stompers objects to not having their own night, they keep their complaints to themselves, or far away from either our ears or Sean’s. The clubhouse conversation becomes cleaner, more sanitized. The baseline level of homophobic language—from off-color comments to unthinking adjectives—recedes. In a game against the Pacifics a few days before Sean came out, San Rafael’s designated hitter/third baseman Adrian Martinez was pressed into service as a catcher and inelegantly squatted behind home plate. “This catcher’s going down to one knee,” Isaac Wenrich said in the dugout. “He’s getting ready for tonight. He must be from the rainbow district of San Fran.” Jon Rand, the cheerful San Franciscan, responded, “Hey, what’s wrong with that?”
Sean’s announcement stops this sort of exchange. “I definitely heard homophobic things every day before I came out,” he tells Sam. “I pretty much just assumed that it was all in jest, just habits. It just made me come out sooner so that I could start teaching people. That stuff only bothers me because it bothers other people.” What bothered him more was having to hold back during clubhouse bull sessions—a more acute version of the personality-sapping politeness that accompanies any new relationship. As an unproven rookie, Sean didn’t want to police what other players said from his first day in uniform. Nor did he want to adapt his own identity to the team’s. “I just stayed quiet a lot more of the time,” he says. After he goes public, his mood improves “immediately, like day one,” he says. “I just feel better when everyone knows the truth.”
Sam asks if Sean has noticed any subtle signs of disapproval after the announcement: players going out of their way to walk around him, anyone averting their eyes. But Sean isn’t gregarious, which makes the answer less obvious. “I avert my eyes,” Sean says. “If someone wants to come talk to me, then I’ll pay attention, but I’m not one to go out of my way to talk to people. So it’s just hard to tell.”
Like any clique composed of mostly unsupervised people whose prefrontal cortexes haven’t fully matured, the Stompers joke and jockey for social status by mocking each other’s most salient surface-level traits. The players pile on Andrew Parker for being a meathead. Gered Mochizuki, the short Hawaiian, gets called “coconut head” and “midget.” T. J. Gavlik, who’s half Asian, hears a steady stream of slurs and stereotypes. Players tell him to “hit it to Hong Kong” or promise to reward his hits by buying him a cat for dinner. They call him “supple leopard” and “crouching tiger, hidden T. J.” They make jokes about how he’s afraid of dishonoring the umpire. All of these words would be offensive in other environments—maybe even in this environment, given a different group of guys, or the wrong mix of moods, or less shared history. In the clubhouse, though, they’re mostly seen as signs of acceptance, routine shit tests that every pro player has passed (and administered) since Little League. Although there’s no telling whether every insult is really shrugged off as easily as the players make it appear, the intention isn’t to hurt. It might hurt more not to be mocked, which would mean being beneath the team’s notice.
In the immediate aftermath of the announcement, the team’s conversational tone around Sean takes on an almost Victorian propriety. No one wants to say something inappropriate and become the bigot of Sean’s story. This is mildly uncomfortable for all involved: The players feel they have to watch their words, and Sean says he feels self-conscious because he senses their restraint and knows “that people might not be completely open with me, just because I’m always talking to reporters and they always ask me about my relationship with my teammates.” The clubhouse is usually a place where players can be their most unrestrained selves. Now it’s a place where they feel obligated to be on their best behavior, a possible drag on morale.
Gradually, though, the language loosens. During a pregame Smash Bros. session about a week after the announcement, Jon Rand, who’s one of Sean’s closest friends on the team, makes a joke about “playing Smash with fairy boy.” He’s talking about Link, the hero of the Legend of Zelda and the character he’s controlling in the game, but he’s also talking about Sean, who’s seated beside him. By the time everyone turns toward Sean to gauge his reaction, he’s already smiling.
That smile seems to open the offensive floodgates. In the dugout one day, Rand brags about how his butt looks in baseball pants, and someone else says Sean’s looks better. “Hey, buy me dinner first,” Sean responds. On another night, Sean is pitching against San Rafael and working so quickly that he can’t wait to return to the mound after a half inning off. “Sean, slow down and let me put a dip in my mouth,” Isaac says. “That wasn’t a gay reference. I said dip.” On still another night, Feh yells, “At least lube us up, at least give us some K-Y” at one of the many umpires he thinks is squeezing the Stompers.
And during a cold, windy game in Vallejo, I sit in the bullpen, listening in on a conversation in which the other relievers ask Sean about “signals,” or ways to tell whether someone is gay. Erik Gonsalves suggests the silliest signals he can think of—flight attendants with crooked name tags, or drivers with their side mirrors fully extended. Isaac, serving as the bullpen catcher on a scheduled rest day, observes that the right fielder is wearing sunglasses on his hat even though the sun has long since set. He asks if that’s a signal. I look at Sean and see that he has multiple sunglasses on his hat—his own, and also Rand’s, since the lefty left his with his friend when he entered the game. “That’s the signal,” I say, pointing at Sean’s hat. “Two pairs o
f sunglasses.” He laughs. Now even I’m doing it.
In a normal workplace, these comments would be grounds for a lawsuit, or at the very least a sensitivity seminar. In baseball, they represent a strange sort of progress. “You can kinda tell when people are holding back from jokes they would make, so the more days that go by, the more every once in a while people start to be okay with it,” Sean says. “And I’m trying to jump right on and be like, ‘Okay, yeah, yeah, that’s fine. Keep doing that.’ It’s what makes me feel comfortable.”
The integration has gone as well as we could have imagined. For years, ballplayers and sportswriters have said baseball clubhouses weren’t ready for a gay ballplayer—but that just turned out to be its own hurtful stereotype, a presumption that the jocks wouldn’t act the way any decent people do toward a friend. It was an excuse, and the fear it engendered may have delayed this moment for years. Professional baseball, we’ve discovered, is no less enlightened than the rest of society: Sean is prepared for the Pacific Association, and the Pacific Association is prepared for Sean. “I don’t know if people thought [it wouldn’t be] because of the culture cop that baseball is in the locker rooms, just all the different backgrounds that people come from,” Sean says. “You can never know how many people are going to be hard core, set in their ways.” Sam and I weren’t seriously concerned, but even we underestimated the Stompers. Sean was right not to fear anything but the bus to Petaluma.
Back in Clifton Park, Sean’s parents discover that they have one more gay relation than they had thought.
“I have a relative who was gay also, and had never come out,” Jack Conroy tells me. “He was almost seventy years old. And because of Sean, he was able to come out. He felt so good about what was going on that he really felt compelled to.”
“[Jack’s relative] called me and he said, ‘I don’t know if you’ve figured this out or not, but if Sean can do it, I can do it,’” Terry Conroy recounts. She also tells me that Sean’s story has made her a magnet for anyone in Clifton Park with a gay family member.
“I’ve had a lot of people come to me,” Terry says. “Like our hairdresser said, ‘My older brother’s gay,’ and a guy at work told me that his oldest son is. Everybody just feels the need to tell me now.” She smiles. “But can they pitch?”
* * *
One day fairly early in the season I bought a heavy steel safe and put it in the clubhouse, right by the Wonder Bread and peanut butter and below the whiteboard that tells ballplayers what time they have to be at batting practice. The same day, I distributed a survey to each of the players, asking two questions: “How ‘locked-in’ are you?” and “How’s your mood?” We intend to test the reasonable hypothesis that happy ballplayers play better (as opposed to the even more reasonable but not mutually exclusive hypothesis that ballplayers who play better get happier), and to see whether we can find some evidence that hot streaks are real by, in essence, asking players to predict their own. The lockbox is to put the players’ minds at ease, to reassure them that we’re not going to use their happiness levels as a way of making roster or lineup decisions. They can stuff their responses into the safe, and we won’t look at them until after the season.
Which means we didn’t know what response Sean gave on June 25, the day that the first openly gay baseball player would start in a professional baseball game. We didn’t know whether reading articles by national baseball writers praising him for his courage and strength would make him feel courageous and strong—or whether his inability to avoid hateful comments at the bottom of those articles would make him feel persecuted and alone. We didn’t know what it meant to him that, on the day of the game, Sergio Miranda and Jon Rand arranged for every player’s locker to have a pair of rainbow socks, and that nearly all the players would wear those socks—or, as many modified them, armbands—as a show of support for him.
Nor did we know what it was like to see teammates who had previously been so casual about insensitive speech—one of our veterans once told us he had opted to sign with us, not San Rafael, because “they’re too faggy over there”—respond with such positive nonchalance to his announcement. Or what it was like that at least a couple of season-ticket holders and host families are boycotting this game. Or how it feels to have the world picking over his relationship with his teammates, wanting to know what it’s like for them in the locker room, not knowing that the relationship between him and his teammates developed over a month of intimacy, of accidental moments like the time he got drunk downtown and tried to walk three miles home but got so lost he eventually had to turn right back around and walk downtown again, by which point it was so late and he was so disoriented that all he could do was find Arnold Field and hop the fence and sleep in a huddle on the dugout bench, and how everybody found out about this so that’s why they all call him “Sleepy,” and is that relevant to the gay thing? We don’t know what it was like to watch his catcher, Isaac Wenrich, get ambushed by a TV interviewer right in the middle of his pregame preparation and answer questions so beautifully, talking about how Sean on the mound is just a pitcher and an athlete and how not one guy on the team sees him as anything but a teammate, completely equal, nothing complicated about it, and we sort of look at each other shocked, like Isaac? Isaac said that?
“Theo, don’t you ever ambush me with a fucking camera again,” Isaac complains afterward. “I don’t know how to answer gay questions. The guy’s like, ‘What’s it like playing with gay Sean?’ I don’t know. Shit. He’s Sean. He’s awesome at Mario. He Smashes me.”
Then Isaac walks out of the dugout to go warm up Sean in the bullpen, and calls out to some teammates in a bored monotone, “Hey everybody, Sean’s gay.”
Before the game, Sam stands in the batter’s box in the bullpen, giving Sean a dummy to pitch against so that he can replicate the feeling of facing a real batter. The slider is sharp today; Sam bails out of the way. The fastball whistles. The command is tight. Sam asks him, “So hey, you nervous?” And Sean answers, “No more than any other day.”
We’re nervous. Not the gay thing. The starting pitching thing. For three weeks Sam and I have been agitating with Feh for Sean to get more innings—our most effective pitcher has thrown the fewest innings of anyone on the staff. In those few innings he has been the league’s best pitcher, allowing only two hits and no earned runs, with just one walk. He also plays great defense and has a swell pickoff move. He’s clearly way too good to use exclusively in protection of three-run leads in the ninth inning. But we have concerns about Sean as a starter. He basically uses only two pitches, so batters will have seen everything he throws by the end of the first at-bat. (A slight wrinkle is his over-the-top surprise, which is usually good for one strike per game per batter.) He succeeds partly because of a deceptive motion, which will get less deceptive the more a batter sees it. He is less dominant against lefties, who pick up the ball out of his hand better and lay off his slider. And he hasn’t thrown more than two innings in a month, so we have no idea how much stamina he’ll have as a starter. In a way, Sean being gay has called our bluff: We were like third-party candidates whose positions could never be proven wrong, until by fluke of circumstance we accidentally got elected.
* * *
“We win when we hug,” Joel Carranza announces in the dugout. “We win when we hug.” He goes from teammate to teammate, hugging them all, hugging Sean. Isaac and Mike Jackson join in, hugging, hugging, hugging, hugging. “Brothers don’t shake hands. Brothers hug.”
Sean takes the field to more applause than usual, but it’s a pretty typical weeknight crowd—478 is the official paid attendance. This is not Jose Canseco appearing for two games and a home run derby; to most Stompers fans, it’s just baseball. “Why are they wearing those socks?” one young fan wonders aloud, and nobody answers. Sean takes a deep breath on the mound, then throws his first pitch: a swinging strike.
He gets another swinging strike, then tries to get Vallejo’s leadoff hitter, Jaylen Harris, to chase a ball ou
t of the zone. After Sean’s third wayward attempt, Harris jogs down to first base. “We play four in this league,” Eric Schwieger calls from the dugout, and everybody laughs at Harris’s goof. “You know what’s embarrassing?” Jon Rand asks. “That.” Harris digs back in, and Conroy fires his 3-2 pitch: strike three looking.
“Well, the changeup’s working,” Jon says. “I taught him that pitch.” He turns to a reporter and points to the notepad. “Put that in there.” A voice calls out from the stands, “Wake up, Sleepy!” which makes all of us insiders laugh.
From there, it’s dominance. Sean calmly walks off the mound after the first inning and asks Sam for a pen; he keeps a broken-bat tally on the bill of his cap, and he just got one. Vallejo will never get two men on in an inning, will never get a runner past second base. The Stompers score a run in the third to get Sean a lead, then a pair of runs in each of the next three innings, and the closest thing to a contest comes when Harris gets forced out at second base in the sixth and gets up jawing at second baseman Sergio Miranda. Feh nearly runs in from center field to fight him—“Don’t try to be a gangster!” he’s yelling—and Carranza takes a step out of the dugout, hollering, “We could do this right here, bro.” There’s some discussion in the dugout about whether Isaac should put down the sign for a beanball, which, apparently, is a middle finger. The decision is no.
That decision is one of two we have to make. The other is whether to let Sean keep pitching deep into the game. He’s not, in baseball lingo, stretched out for such a start, but he’s insistent. Feh, who’s unhappy that a Sean start has been forced on him and mutters that Sean is “fucking himself” by wanting to stay in, tries to remove him. Sean pleads his case. A week earlier, in an attempt to get more innings, Sean had gone into Feh’s office and asked to be removed from the closer’s role. He told Feh he was having trouble recovering quickly from his outings, so it didn’t make sense to use him in a role that might require back-to-back appearances. This was, basically, a lie, anything to get Feh to loosen up the “only in save situations” limitation, and Feh rebuffed him in an unsatisfying conversation that lasted less than a minute. Now, having temporarily lost the right to use his pitcher as he pleases, Feh is sour that Sean isn’t letting him take his closer out of a game in which he’s dominating as a starter.
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