“There have been approximately 10,000 big league baseball players in my lifetime,” says 67-year-old East Bay novelist Jack Saunders. “It’s impossible that none of them have been gay, yet 100% of those who were chose to remain in the closet, at least during their playing careers. “I thought the consequences of the first active major league baseball player to come out and the story behind it would make for an interesting book project.”
That is the back story to Baseball Comes Out, Saunders’s exploration of the first acknowledged gay player to come out while still in the big leagues. As it happens, the protagonist plays for the San Francisco Giants and is portrayed as the best closer in the big leagues; meaning the team would be inclined to put up with the distractions created by such an event. That his partner is the team’s best pinch hitter and a respected veteran of nearly 20 seasons adds further spice to the story.
“In my mind, the plight of gays is the civil rights issue of the early 21st Century,” Saunders said. “It’s easy to forget that right after World War II, African Americans often could not frequent the same restaurants or drink from the same water fountains as white Americans could. Most of us now, naturally, see that as ridiculous. I believe that Americans later in this century won’t understand the furor around same-sex marriage and the reluctance of gay athletes to be themselves in public. The movie 42 featured the heroism of Jackie Robinson but also highlighted the ignorance and bigotry of some of his white contemporaries. I tried to do the same thing with my book.”
Baseball Comes Out is a what-if story. What if a gay major leaguer decided to come out of the closet? How would the baseball establishment react? What affect would a gay player have on his team? How would fans behave? “This is not the rant of a gay man,” Saunders says, but rather a protest by an offended baseball fan. “The game I love is screwing men I admire. The villain here is the closet itself.”
The author’s background as a professor at Golden Gate University and a corporate p.r. director for Lawrence Livermore Labs and Pacific Bell are especially useful has he takes us behind the scenes for plausible front office and consultant conversations. The book’s characters are multi-dimensional and the baseball segments are realistic.
A gay athlete coming out in one of the four major North American team sports is probably more a matter of when, not if. World class athletes in tennis, rugby, soccer and golf have already done so. Retired gay football and baseball players have published books about their time as pro athletes in the closet. Reading Baseball Comes Out is akin to reviewing the first draft of a coming major event in American sports history.
Baseball Comes Out is available as an e-book on amazon.com for kindle readers.
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