Glenn Burke: The Powerful Story People Were Not Ready To Hear

The disappointing, still ongoing story of the pioneer that baseball did not want.

Welcome back to my Sports Passion Project everybody, where today, I’m going to talk about former MLB Centre Fielder Glenn Burke.

If you know why I’ve come to talk about Glenn Burke today, then you know, but please keep that information to yourself for the next little while, not to ruin it for everybody else.

There are several disclaimers that I would like to give you before we begin, both about the story being told and the storyteller telling it, but in the interest of properly representing Glenn Burke and the man that he was, I’m not going to give you any of them. I’m going to give you the story raw, and everything that you need to know about both myself and Glenn will come out in the course of the piece.

Enjoy the ride.

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Glenn Burke was a pioneer, a man who grew up in a place that was the heart of American social change, and grew pioneers on trees as a result.

Glenn was born and raised in the East Bay Area of California. The same East Bay area that gave us Bill Russell (NBA icon, and the first black coach in any of the North American Big Four sports leagues), Frank Robinson (MLB’s first black baseball manager), Pumpsie Green (the first black man to play baseball in Boston, the final MLB city to integrate), Curt Flood (who sacrificed his career to bring about the end of the reserve clause in baseball), and mountains more.

The East Bay in general and Oakland in specific did not just give us sporting pioneers (in both a racial sense like Bill Russell and a non-racial sense like Curt Flood). It also gave us all-time greats, like Rickey Henderson, Joe Morgan, Willie Stargell, Dave Stewart, and many others, all just in baseball.

Glenn Burke had this blood in his veins.

Growing up the son of a single mother trying to raise eight children on the salary of a nurse’s aide, Glenn nevertheless was an athletic marvel. A playground legend. He was scholarship calibre in three different sports, being wanted as a track runner, where his 100 yard dash was less than ten seconds as a high schooler, basketball player, where he could dunk with two hands at less than six feet tall, and baseball player, where his throwing arm was 80 grade (the very best grade available, for the non-baseball fans in the audience), and he also had impressive home run power for a man of such short stature.

While undeniably short, Glenn Burke was not small. His baseball reference page has him listed at six feet tall, 195 pounds. I don’t think he was ever six feet tall, but 195 pounds is an underestimation of just how big this man was. There are multiple reports putting him around 225 pounds at his biggest, which on a frame that (sorry Glenn) is not even six feet tall, is nothing to scoff at.

While we know which sport Glenn would play professionally, his first love was basketball. He accepted two different basketball scholarships. One from the University of Nevada. One from the University of Denver, but Glenn could not stick in either place, eventually leaving both programs to play junior college basketball in California.

He did not come home because he was not good enough. Very far from that. He was not cut from either program. Both the Wolfpack and the Pioneers wanted Glenn, but according to the man himself, he could not handle the cold. Living in a cold weather climate would never work for him, so he broke and went home.

As happy as I am for Glenn that he realised he could never be happy, and acted on his convictions, this decision to move back home severed any path he could’ve ever had to the NBA. Not being six feet tall, it was going to be hard enough to begin with, but a junior college athlete that isn’t six feet tall? There is no chance.

Glenn knew this, so he decided to accept a contract offer from the Los Angeles Dodgers, who had drafted him with a throwaway pick in the 17th round, to play baseball professionally.

Our man was not a 17th round calibre baseball prospect. It was just thought that he was going to be playing basketball, so nobody attempted to throw a pick higher than this in his direction. Jim Gilliam, Dodger legend and Dodger coach as Glenn was coming through the minors, took one look at him and infamously declared him the next Willie Mays. That’s praise not indicative of 17th round draft status.

Jim Gilliam is not a scout, but this is a man that’d seen a lot of baseball, and had played against Willie Mays in his days as a player, hundreds and hundreds of times. This is a man that knew what he was talking about, and knew that Glenn Burke was a player to watch.

Glenn did not disappoint. In his first year in A ball at the age of 20, he batted .297 and posted a .787 OPS, all while being well ahead of the aging curve. Most 20 year old players were still in rookie ball in Glenn’s time. He struggled with a promotion to AA (often seen as the toughest promotion in baseball) in 1974, as a man almost two full years younger than the league average, but got back on the horse in 1975.

His .709 OPS is not super inspiring in retrospect, but nobody used OPS in 1975. In terms of batting average, Glenn batted .270, which was seen as pretty good for a man who was holding as a good defensive outfielder into the higher levels of the minor leagues. This 1975 was seen as good enough by the Dodgers to get our man yet another promotion in 1976.

This time, he was coming all the way up to the big club.

Like many prospects, Glenn’s first stint in the big leagues did not last very long. He was used to pinch hit for relief pitcher Mike Marshall on Opening Day 1976, making the final out of the game grounding into a fielder’s choice, but did not get another AB for three weeks, being used exclusively as a pinch runner and defensive replacement. He finally got his first start on April 29 against the St Louis Cardinals, batting leadoff and playing Left Field.

Side note. Is it common in the 1970s for baseball teams to leave a player rotting on the bench for a month, and then insert him into the lineup as the leadoff hitter? This doesn’t seem like something I would do.

It’s a rather auspicious start to a Major League career, as Glenn collects his first MLB hit, an infield single off SP Pete Falcone, and then immediately erases himself by getting caught stealing, but who am I to suggest this man shouldn’t bat leadoff, as he ends his first MLB start with two hits and a walk in his four plate appearances, with one run scored, and one driven in.

The next day, Glenn starts and bats leadoff again, collecting two more hits and scoring two more runs in his five plate appearances, but then goes strictly back to pinch running and defensive replacements again. The Dodgers eventually realise it’s silly to have a good prospect glued to the bench like this, so they send him back to AAA for more seasoning.

His first month in the majors consisted of nine appearances (games played, to my non-baseball fans), but only ten plate appearances. To his credit, he did find four hits and a walk in those ten plate appearances, but clearly, the Dodgers didn’t think he was ready.

By this point, four years into his professional baseball career, it’s clear that the HR power the Dodgers thought they could develop has not translated into the pro ranks for Glenn, with his career high in a (minor or major league) season being 12 in 1975, but with a .300 AAA batting average in 1976 after being sent back down, he’s a better contact hitter than expected, and he has replaced the power element of his game with another, stealing 63 bases against just 13 times caught (83%) in a 1976 season where he remains in AAA for just 119 games.

At 23 years old in a 1976 Pacific Coast League where the average age was older than 25, Glenn’s stats get even better against the tougher level of competition, compared against his 1975 AA numbers. There are no minor league defensive metrics in 1976, but by all accounts he still looks good in CF next to his peers on the AAA rung of the ladder too.

All of this means that while the power element of his game has disappointed, he is still seen as a top prospect, and when the minor league season ends, and September roster expansion begins in 1976, the big call to play for the Los Angeles Dodgers comes again for Glenn.

He plays more the second time around, getting 41 plate appearances in this 20 day stint, but after getting on base five out of his first ten tries back in April, he does so in only eight of these 41 tries in September.

That’s not a very good final look, but Glenn is still just 23 years old. He’s got plenty of time. By the time 1977 begins, he is just 24, and the Dodgers do not look to repeat the mistakes of last April, bringing him up just to waste him on the bench, so they leave him in AAA for 44 games to begin the year, where Glenn takes the step forward the team is looking for. His batting average goes up just nine points to .309, but his OPS goes all the way up to .877, on account of his slugging percentage getting all the way up to .505 in 44 AAA games.

This is what the Dodgers need to see, so they bring Glenn to the majors again, and this time, they’re intent to use him. He plays every day in some fashion from the date of his call up on June 3 to June 18, but when Glenn’s hitting makes clear it’s still struggling at the MLB level (six hits and two walks in 33 PAs in this period), his usage falls back into the old pattern.

He becomes part of a platoon with Rick Monday in the CF spot, and as everybody knows, if you’re the right handed batter, which Glenn is, you’re on the bad end of the platoon. He does not get another start until July 2nd, not after that until July 12th, and etcetera. Things continue in this fashion for the rest of the year. Glenn faces most of the left handers, but there are few left handed starters, so he basically takes on a fourth outfielder’s workload. He accrues 47 plate appearances in July, 34 in August, and 58 in September, for 169 total, a pace that would’ve seen him get to roughly 230 PAs, had he been in the Major Leagues for the whole year.

What takes me aback about this 1977 Glenn Burke season is how irregularly he plays anywhere except CF. There are 19 defensive innings in total in left and right, but over 400 in Centre. This indicates to me that despite his horrendous -6 Total Zone runs in just 403 innings at CF, somebody saw him as a good defender, at least better than starting RF Reggie Smith and starting LF Dusty Baker.

Speaking of Dusty Baker, are you ready to hear the story that defines Glenn Burke’s MLB career?

It’s the final game of the 1977 MLB season. Our Dodgers are hosting the Houston Astros for the final series of the year, and we’re playing for nothing. We’ve been playing for nothing for weeks. We clinched the NL West a week ago, and in practical terms, it’s been in our hands for longer than that. Let’s not kid ourselves though. This game is still not meaningless enough to start Glenn Burke. Not according to manager Tommy Lasorda.

Even in the final game of a season that’s been over for at least two weeks just waiting for the NLCS, he still trots out regular CF Rick Monday, but for my NFL fans out there, this is like the first half of a game where a team is resting starters. Everybody gets two plate appearances and then gets pulled out. The Dodgers use an absurd 20 players in this nine inning game. Only three of them are pitchers.

This final game ‘let’s play everybody’ chicanery is what leads to the almost equally absurd fact that in the sixth inning of this game, Glenn Burke is pinch hitting for Steve Garvey, which explains how he ends up batting cleanup, behind Dusty Baker, and how he finds himself in the situation to be able to do what he does next.

With Dusty Baker at the plate, and Glenn in the on-deck circle, nobody knew that the world was about to change forever, but when Dusty steps up to the plate and smacks a home run deep to centre field, his 30th of he year, the 1977 Los Angeles Dodgers have just become the first team in National League history to have four players (Garvey, Baker, Reggie Smith, and Ron Cey) with at least 30 home runs.

This is a nifty accomplishment, so even in this meaningless regular season game, the players are pretty excited. As Dusty rounds third base and touches the plate, Glenn (only there to begin with because he is pinch hitting for Steve Garvey) raises his hands in the air, and Dusty, not knowing what to do with himself, slaps Glenn’s hand.

The first recorded high five. Glenn is in the warm up jacket.

Immediately following this, Glenn steps into the box, and puts a 2-2 fastball into the LF bleachers, for his first career MLB home run.

I told you the power hasn’t translated for Glenn, and I meant it. As of October 2, 1977, Glenn Burke has just ten career extra base hits, despite his CF speed, so to say he is jubilant when he finally hits a home run, over 200 PAs into his career, is an understatement. All of his teammates are excited for him as well, and the man on the very top step of the dugout to greet him when he gets back is Dusty Baker. Glenn slaps Dusty’s hand, repayment for earlier, and all of the Dodgers begin slapping Glenn’s hands.

Nobody on October 2, 1977 knows just how well this is going to end up catching on, but Glenn Burke and Dusty Baker have just invented the high five.

Think of any dugout celebration your team does in 2025. Every team has one. For the 1977 Los Angeles Dodgers, their cool idea for a dugout celebration became to slap each other’s hands. Through the NLCS, in which Glenn plays every game, gets no hits, but the Dodgers still win 3-1, the team is high fiving, and in the 1977 World Series, where Glenn starts and gets the hit that could’ve driven in Steve Garvey for the game winning run, had Steve not been thrown out at the plate, the team is high fiving whenever there is a good moment, although there are not many high fives as the team loses 4-2 to the Yankees.

In his first full season at the Major League level, Glenn Burke has started a World Series game. Only one, giving way to Rick Monday for the rest, but one is more World Series games than I have ever started. His individual numbers don’t look great (63 OPS+ so far), but at the age of 24, this man is still thought of as a high ranking prospect in the organisation.

In an allegory for modern baseball fans, think of Glenn Burke as a slightly less hyped version of Jarred Kelenic. Jarred Kelenic if he was picked 36th instead of 6th in the draft, if you can envision that. That’s how I would describe Glenn Burke. Like Kelenic, Glenn Burke came up to the majors and was awful in his first season at the plate, but there is faith that he can turn it around moving forward.

He’s got the tools to turn it around, but instead of waiting, the Dodgers decide to cut their losses, and trade Glenn to the Oakland Athletics in exchange for a bit of immediate CF help in the form of Bill North. To the team’s credit, Bill does put up an 82 OPS+ with the 1978 Dodgers, much better than Glenn was doing, but this still feels a bit early to give up on a prospect you had high hopes for.

You can think of the 1978 Oakland Athletics just like you think of the modern Athletics. At least it was home for Glenn, and for that reason he was at least somewhat happy to hear the news, but in a baseball sense, Oakland is exile. After the success of the early 1970s, but before Billy Martin, is a bleak period in Athletics history. The very most bleak period in that history until the 2020s, and this is what Glenn Burke gets dropped right in the middle of.

Can you blame him for struggling?

Going to Oakland is never a good thing for the career of a hitter, but Glenn’s hitting was so bad to begin with that his numbers truly couldn’t be any worse. In the 1978 season, he posted an OPS+ of 62, identical to 1977 in LA, but in 1979, it did somehow get worse. Through the fourth of June, his OPS+ was an appalling 41, and Glenn Burke finally broke.

If not for doing it himself, the team would’ve done it for him, but on the fourth of June, 1979, Glenn Burke quit baseball. He retired altogether. Glenn did reverse course and try to come back for 1980, but upon tearing his knee in 1980 Spring training, the team demoted him to AAA, and he was never able to make it back. By 1982, he was entirely out of professional baseball. A prospect that got a lot of hype, but ultimately never made it.

If you combine all of his assorted Major League stints together, you get roughly one full season’s worth of plate appearances for Glenn. In these 556 plate appearances, Glenn batted .237/.270/.291, for a career OPS of .561. He did play a whole career in pitching-friendly ballparks, but this is an OPS+ of just 57. That is not MLB quality hitting.

With all the chances he got, you would think that Glenn’s poor hitting would be bailed out by his defence in Centre Field, but it isn’t. His total zone over his career is -13 runs in a 1294.2 inning sample. For those around here who are perhaps not familiar with baseball statistics, especially ones as old as total zone defence, -13 runs in roughly one full season of work would generally be put into the ‘bad but not unusable’ category. Think of it roughly like a 0 EPA/Play QB. You would generally want to move a player to an easier defensive position with numbers like this, but it’s not untenable.

That’s what Glenn Burke’s defence was, and comparing it to his hitting, which was untenable, means his defence was actually the strong side of his game. All of this adds up to him being a -2.4 WAR (Wins Above Replacement level) player for his career, according to baseball reference. That is extremely bad, indicating he was a significant hinderance to most teams he was on.

That truly is the statement on Glenn Burke’s tenure in Major League Baseball.

He was a hyped up prospect who had good AA and AAA numbers, who was on a team high profile enough to spontaneously invent the high five and have it stick, but Glenn just couldn’t make it in the majors. Call him a AAAA player if you’d like. That is not a level of baseball that exists, but it’s a term that tends to be used for guys like Glenn, who were too good for AAA, but not quite good enough for MLB.

As this article seems to be coming to a close, I can hear you wondering two things. Why on Earth have I decided to write an article on such a bad player, that never really showed any upside at the Major League level, and why on Earth have you read it?

That is 3386 words of your life that you’re never getting back. Sure, he invented the high five. That’s cool, but if I wanted strictly to talk about inventing the high five, this article would be about Dusty Baker. I could’ve squeezed the high five story into something I was saying about Dusty, and Glenn Burke would’ve been nothing but a footnote.

That’s my problem.

In the history of baseball, Glenn Burke is a footnote.

Glenn Burke should not be a footnote. Glenn Burke is a pioneer. Everybody should know his name. He should possibly have his number retired throughout the MLB, just like Jackie Robinson does.

All of this might bring a third question to your mind. Why would we heap all these accolades onto a player with a career OPS+ of 57? The answer quite honestly depends on how much you believe the real world should cross into our beloved sports world. I’m personally in favour of limiting line crossing as much as possible, hence my continuously saying ‘pro sports is not real life’ on this publication. However, there are some times when real life needs to intervene even in my vision of the sports world, and this is one of them.

Glenn Burke is the first openly gay athlete in the history of North American sports.

My apologies for pulling the wool over your eyes, not letting you know the most crucial detail of the story until over 3500 words into it, but there’s a method to my madness. It’s twofold. First, Glenn Burke is not Glenn Burke’s sexual orientation. He had an entire professional baseball career, eight years’ worth, and to begin this article with an immediate rainbow tint on all the facts would feel like reducing Glenn Burke to the one gay guy in the room. I was not willing to do that.

Second, I wanted you to feel those same feelings that baseball fans of the 1970s felt. Glenn Burke was in baseball, and then he was not in baseball, all without much fanfare. There are hundreds of outfielders like Glenn Burke in the history of baseball. Probably thousands. He simply was not special. This is how the story was presented at the time Glenn was playing. This is what people thought about him, for years.

I’d forgive you for not knowing just how special Glenn Burke truly was, because the sports world has taken step after step to bury him, both literally, by contributing to the sequence of events that led to Glenn’s early death, and in the media.

If you type into Google the simple phrase ‘first openly gay athlete,’ the first result (at least on my Canadian version of Google) is an ESPN article titled ‘The Brief History of Gay Athletes.’ This article incorrectly cites Glenn as having not come out publicly until 1993.

The second result is from some place called campuspride.org, and they also incorrectly cite Glenn Burke as having come out in 1993, likely a by-product of ESPN’s mistake. There are also far too many articles incorrectly citing NBA player Jason Collins as having been the first athlete to come out while his career was still ongoing in one of the North American Big Four sports leagues.

I have no disrespect for Jason Collins. I’m happy he got some credit that he did not deserve, because at least somebody was telling a gay man’s story, but lost in the shuffle of it all is the real OG, which is indisputably Glenn Burke, and now that we know this about him, allow me to retell the story.

The order of events is odd, and the facts very hazy in the case of Glenn Burke, his sexual identity, and what it did or didn’t mean to his contemporaries, so I will cover it all as carefully as possible, beginning with a request sent to all Major League Baseball clubs in 1974 by LGBTQ magazine The Advocate, which in the beginning was a newsletter, no different than this newsletter, sent out by a Los Angeles-based group you may have heard of, even if you didn’t know you’d heard of it, called PRIDE (Personal Rights In Defence & Education).

The organisation did not last, but the acronym did, as did their newsletter, which by 1974 was a magazine, and the request this magazine sent to Major League Baseball’s clubs was a simple one. They were looking to interview a gay ballplayer. This seems like a basic enough thing to ask for, but the range of responses the magazine got to this simple request ranged between no response at all on the good end, and serious hostility on the bad end.

The most famous of the received responses came from Minnesota Twins’ PR director Tom Gee, and reads as follows:

“The cop-out, immoral lifestyle of the tragic misfits espoused by your publication has no place in organized athletics at any level. Your colossal gall in attempting to extend your perversion to an area of total manhood is just simply unthinkable.”

There are multiple problematic sentiments in each sentence of this two sentence reply, but I’m not here to discuss Tom Gee’s politics. Tom’s quote is here to provide what I believe to be a representative view of homosexuality in professional baseball at the time Glenn Burke was a professional baseball player. This quote is from 1974. Glenn had already transitioned to AA ball by 1974.

Conveniently enough for us, 1974 is also a significant year in the life of Glenn Burke.

He did not come out of the womb a gay man, and in fact, if I had to lay out the order of events for you, Glenn Burke was a professional baseball player before he was a gay man. Professional baseball helped Glenn Burke figure out he was a gay man.

Throughout his entire life, Glenn had been a star athlete. We discussed this at the top. Elite in track. Elite in basketball. Elite in baseball. One of the things that comes with being such an elite athlete is a constant stream of suitors. These suitors are not always sexual in nature, but when you’re the star player, people want to be in your orbit, and some of these people in your orbit will be looking to pursue a sexual relationship.

Even in NorCal, the most accepting place of LGBTQ people in the entire continental US at the time, sexual education at the time Glenn Burke was in school can be described as nothing other than extremely poor. While he was in high school, homosexuality was still a diagnosable mental disorder, for which there were prescribed treatments. The Stonewall Raid happened when Glenn was in the tenth grade.

It’s okay if you don’t know what the Stonewall Raid is, because I can guarantee you at least know of the annual celebration intended to celebrate each anniversary of the Stonewall Raid. These days, we call that annual celebration Pride Month.

Needless to say, there was not a perception of what gayness was or what that could possibly mean in the mind of young Glenn Burke. All he knew was that girls were consistently throwing themselves at him, and he consistently found himself disinterested in their advances. Because of this, the star athlete never even went on a date in his four years of high school. Neither romantic nor sexual relationships were a part of Glenn’s life in any capacity.

This was mentally distressing for the young man, because he was turning down opportunities that other teenage boys would kill for, and all his friends were constantly questioning why, or straight up telling him it was the wrong move, as they pursued those opportunities themselves. It also couldn’t have been fun, even as the star athlete who can dunk with two hands and just accepted a basketball scholarship, to be the one guy who’s never gotten a date. Everybody can understand the pain this must have caused him. Why was he not interested in dating?

This continued into his minor league baseball days. There are several stories of females making themselves known to Glenn, making it known what their intentions were, and him flatly turning them down. There was no revulsion. No disrespect. Just disinterest, and this remained bothersome. These days, the conclusion would be natural. Glenn would’ve had adequate sexual education to be able to understand what he was feeling, but I just can’t understate how different the times were in the early 1970s. Glenn didn’t understand what about himself was causing him to feel this way.

Then, in the offseason following the 1974 minor league baseball season, Glenn had his first sexual encounter with a male, and it all clicked into place. This was the internal realisation that all people who find themselves in the LGBTQ community have at one point or another, and it actually came as an immense relief.

Many men of Glenn’s stature, a highly touted baseball prospect in the mid 1970s, would have been appalled by their own desires, and tried to seek out some kind of ‘help,’ which many homophobic people would’ve been happy to offer him, but, perhaps a function of being raised in America’s very most gay-friendly area in the East Bay, Glenn was far from being appalled. He instead embraced his newly discovered self fairly seamlessly. While on the road playing baseball, he would visit local gay bars. While at home in Oakland in the offseasons, he would be a regular in the Castro district (one of America’s very first gay communities). He took to being a gay male with a vigor few would have in his place and time.

But there is a catch.

In his minor league career, Glenn worked quite hard to ensure that his teammates did not know anything about his being gay. He would stay in hotels separate from his teammates. He gradually quit going out with his teammates (generally replacing those nights out with individual visits to the local gay bar), and etcetera.

Once again, in the modern age, the idea that you’re going to hide your sexual orientation from your teammates while frequenting the Castro district in the offseason is simply ridiculous. It’s not possible, but in the mid 1970s, there were no camera phones, and there was such an idea in everybody’s minds that ballplayers could not possibly also be gay males that Glenn was able to remain undetected for years.

Glenn was not ashamed of himself, and did not feel the need to hide his identity for personal reasons. The fear that Glenn had was that his sexual orientation would prevent him from ever reaching the majors, should it be made public knowledge. Reading that quote from Tom Gee above, I have to say I agree with Glenn. I sincerely doubt he would’ve ever been given a look in the major leagues, had it been known from the start that he was gay.

Instead, Glenn bait and switched everybody.

This is where we get into the nuances of the word ‘open’ and the phrase ‘openly gay’ when saying things like ‘the first openly gay athlete.’ Once he found himself in the Major Leagues for good in the second half of 1977, Glenn dropped the pretense of hiding who he was. He never had the talk with anybody, and in this way I suppose he was, in technical terms, not out yet, but everybody knew.

Everybody knew in the same way that if you’re a parent, you have an understanding that your 16 year old kid has likely already drank alcohol with somebody, somewhere. You don’t have to know in order to know. It was too awkward of a subject to broach in a baseball locker room in 1977, so nobody went as far as to actually talk about it, but Glenn was a gay man living in Los Angeles, who lived his life like a gay man living in Los Angeles, not announcing himself openly, but making little attempt to hide anything from anybody.

As far as I’m concerned, Glenn Burke was as openly gay, beginning in 1977, as openly gay gets.

In this way, everybody knew about Glenn Burke, and at this point, the second half of 1977, the strangest possible thing according to those who ran baseball, but the most normal possible thing to those of us who operate in the real world, happened.

Nobody cared.

Nobody cared when he became part of a platoon with Rick Monday as an openly gay man. Nobody cared when he invented the high five as an openly gay man. Nobody cared when he started a World Series game as an openly gay man. It’s once again hard to envision, because these days, if an openly gay man started in the World Series, it would be Earth shaking, but back in the times when it actually happened, it simply wasn’t an important thing in the Dodger clubhouse.

As far as his Dodger teammates were concerned, Glenn Burke was the CF who started when lefties were pitching, and one that they quite liked at that, because Glenn was the life of the party. He was compared in his time to Richard Pryor in terms of how he could make a room laugh. He had a keen fashion sense, and he was better at dancing than any man who at his peak weighed 225 pounds ought to be. He could carry a party all by himself, and he could do it effortlessly.

In addition to this, Glenn was bad to go off. He had a temper that could (and did, all the time) get him in trouble. Far from the image of an effeminate gay man that existed in the heads of baseball players at the time, Glenn Burke was 225 pounds of twisted black steel. A man who, if he lost his temper, you needed to be out of the way of. In real life, this is not a socially desirable trait, but in a baseball locker room, this temper helped him gain his teammates’ respect.

Glenn Burke may not have been the best baseball player in the world as of 1977, but his teammates liked him, respected him, and expected him to be a contributor to the Dodgers for years to come, given his anointed status as the Centre Fielder of the future. His identity as a gay man did nothing to prevent any of this. Eventually, hopefully, he was going to become the starting CF for the Los Angeles Dodgers, and nobody had a problem with this.

Except for the baseball establishment.

This is where the order of events becomes important. Glenn was a top baseball prospect before he was a gay man. Lots of resources had been invested into him to make him into the CF for the Los Angeles Dodgers before he had ever gone on a date with a male. Nobody in baseball truly knew that they were investing their resources into molding the first openly gay athlete in American team sports, but once they realised what they had done, they realised they wanted no part of it. By that point though, they were too deep in to back out. This is the next Willie Mays, remember? Baseball was stuck in the quandary of wanting Glenn Burke the promising young CF, but not wanting Glenn Burke the openly gay man.

The solution?

Do everything possible to keep Glenn’s identity secret.

Not any particular person is complicit in this, but in the same vain, every single person is complicit in this, because ‘baseball,’ as a concept, is what conspired to hold Glenn Burke’s secret in. It would happen time and again where baseball journalists would think they’d caught onto some big story, spotting Glenn Burke at a gay bar in their city. They’d confront Glenn with it, only to have him admit to everything, right there in front of everybody. The reporter would then sheepishly realise that they had been the only one in the room who did not know about Glenn Burke.

Despite Glenn himself having little aversion to the idea, baseball writers consistently told him that they could not write anything about it in their papers. It was coming from above their heads. Baseball could not change who Glenn Burke was. It could not change the fact that Glenn Burke did not care to hide who he was, but it could surely take away every possible avenue Glenn Burke could’ve possibly used to get his story out there, and that’s what they did.

In the iconic words of Keith Olbermann as it relates to Glenn Burke, baseball didn’t want to know.

Baseball didn’t want anybody else to know either. They didn’t want to promote Glenn Burke, or his story. They didn’t want to deny Glenn Burke, or his story. They didn’t want to lie about Glenn Burke. They didn’t want to tell the truth about Glenn Burke. Baseball didn’t want to ask about Glenn Burke. They didn’t want to tell about Glenn Burke. They didn’t want anybody to ask what they weren’t asking and telling about, and in the late 70s, baseball had the power to make that happen.

Everything about Glenn Burke’s night life was quashed. Everything said so openly in the clubhouse was not permitted ever to be said in the public, and in the offseason after the 1977 World Series, the Los Angeles Dodgers, likely under duress from the league office, offered Glenn $75000 to get married.

‘To a woman?’ Came the response, in Glenn Burke’s sarcastic wit. Dodgers’ GM Al Campanis (who would later be fired for publicly stating he did not believe African Americans had the requisite skills to be baseball managers) stipulated yes. It did have to be a woman, at which point this whole scene got a whole lot less funny. Glenn flatly refused.

I respect Glenn Burke for this, infinitely, and let me explain to you why.

It didn’t have to be a real wedding. All Glenn would’ve had to do was put his name on a piece of paper to wed himself to some female he hardly even had to know. What the Dodgers were truly offering was $75000 ($342K in today’s money), in exchange for Glenn giving them a propaganda opportunity. If rumours about him were to ever come up again, they would have an easy defence.

See? Glenn is not gay. He has a wife. This is a photo of his wife.

The Dodgers were offering Glenn the equivalent of $342K to do nothing but sign a piece of paper. All he had to do to find himself with an extra $342K overnight was to make it just that little bit easier for the team to hide who he was.

He refused.

Ever since he had discovered that he was, in fact, a gay professional baseball player in the winter of 1974, Glenn Burke had devoted himself to a cause. He was going to show the world that LGBTQ people could play the most popular sport in America. They can even make it as far as the World Series. Glenn Burke did that.

Glenn Burke, an openly gay male, started a World Series game. Imagine what this could’ve meant to a community still getting its legs under it in 1977.

Baseball did not want everything that would’ve meant. They wanted no part of it. They wanted so little of this that were willing to offer an absurd amount of money to Glenn just for the chance to make it a little easier to keep his identity under wraps, but even with a pot sweetener of 342 thousand dollars, getting married to a woman would not help Glenn further his cause, so in a moral stance I wish I were brave enough to take myself, he refused.

It’s difficult to decipher the meaning of a man being so principled that he would refuse to hide who he was, but I can tell you that I’m in tears as I try to write this paragraph. I’m not here to discuss my personal sexual orientation with the whole world, but I can tell you that this means a lot to me.

Even now, in 2025, almost fifty years after Glenn Burke started his World Series game, there are millions of people on this continent who hide who they truly are, every day, for free. Glenn Burke turned down $342K, because he wanted all those people to know that a gay male had already started a World Series game, and they could do it too.

Perhaps this puts into better perspective just why the Dodgers were so quick to give up on Glenn in 1978, trading him for an 82 OPS+ Centre Fielder, and it also gives all of you out there, those who don’t know what it’s like, perspective on what it’s like to hold onto a secret like this. Every day, the weight of this secret is felt by millions of people out there, but in 1977, Glenn Burke flipped the script on the Dodgers.

Glenn did not announce who he was publicly (primarily because baseball was in direct or indirect control of all the distribution channels), but he was unwilling to keep who he was a secret, so the weight of keeping Glenn’s secret fell onto the Los Angeles Dodgers, and even the might of the ever-powerful Dodgers organisation could only keep this inside for half a season, before they just had to get it off their roster. That’s why they traded this level of prospect to Oakland for 50 cents on the dollar. They just had to be rid of it. This was a secret that was too big even for them. Those of you who watch baseball know. Nothing is too big for the Dodgers.

Glenn Burke was too big for the Dodgers.

His Dodger teammates were horrified when they found out Glenn was gone. He had become something of a little brother to the team. His teammates rallied around him, protected him, but now they could not. There are reports of grown men crying about this. Grown men don’t cry about baseball trades, but it was not lost on his contemporaries just how special of a case Glenn was.

He was not a very good hitter, but Glenn had become a beloved teammate, and now he was gone, because the Dodgers could not bear the weight of keeping Glenn’s identity a secret. In the words of Dusty Baker, ‘they [GM Al Campanis] don’t want any gays on the team.’

This found Glenn in Oakland, which should have been the best possible environment for him, in one of the country’s most LGBTQ-friendly environments, that also happens to be his hometown. It should have went perfectly, but it didn’t. Quite the opposite. Baseball had effectively kept Glenn’s secret a secret, so revealing himself to an entirely new group of guys once again became Glenn’s responsibility, and in Oakland, this went very poorly.

His teammates did not rally around him the way they did in Los Angeles. They went out of their way to make it hard for him. They would leave the shower when he walked in. They would make little pretense to hide their disgust, and as time went along, this got harder and harder for Glenn to take, which is why he retired from professional baseball midway through the 1979 season.

Glenn was not done with baseball. He was merely done with the environment of that Oakland clubhouse, which is why he agreed to come back when he found out the Athletics were getting a new manager, in hopes that new manager would make things better.

The relationship between Glenn and Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda had been complicated, as it’s in the grey area (too credible for the word alleged but not quite credible enough for the word confirmed) that Glenn at one point dated Tommy Lasorda, Jr..

The Dodger manager lived his whole life in denial about his son’s homosexuality. Even as he lived well into the 2020s, he refused to ever admit that his son was gay and died of AIDS, but I refuse to believe there was no acceptance in him, because he allowed his clubhouse to be a place where Glenn Burke could be accepted as a gay man in Major League Baseball. Tommy could’ve blown it up for Glenn in Los Angeles if he wanted to, easily, and in my opinion he would have if he truly hated LGBTQ people, but didn’t do it.

It’s only conjecture on my part as to whether it was good or bad for Glenn’s career that there existed the frayed but loving relationship between Tommy Lasorda and his very publicly gay son, but it can’t be denied that however open to the gay community Tom Sr. may or may not have been, deep down in his heart, he was the manager that created the clubhouse environment very most conducive to Glenn’s success as a baseball player.

Glenn did not date any sons of baseball managers in Oakland, but neither Jack McKeon, Bobby Winkles, or Jim Marshall were able to create a clubhouse environment where his teammates did not feel free to go out of their way to make his life hard. This is why Glenn quit, and only came back once he heard that the Athletics were getting a new manager.

Unfortunately, that new manager turned out to be Billy Martin, a man so homophobic that he could not even bring himself to look at Glenn standing in the outfield.

When doing the formal introduction of the new Athletics to the old Athletics at 1980 spring training, Billy gave Glenn the following glowing introduction [Sensitive content warning]:

‘This is Glenn. He’s the faggot.’

It says a lot about Billy Martin that he could think of only one word to use to describe Glenn, who by all accounts was a rather big clubhouse personality in his own right, but this is not the first time Glenn heard this word.

Fans insulting outfielders is baseball tradition. It’s as old and in fact older than professional baseball itself. Normally, this back and forth between the outfielders and the fans is all in good fun, mostly making fun of how players wear their pants or arm sleeves or something, but with Glenn, this was not the case. He would commonly hear that F word from opposing fans.

This puts into perspective the constraints of the phrase ‘openly gay.’ Perhaps everybody in the world may not have known of Glenn’s sexual orientation, because baseball had the distribution channels of the day on lockdown, but when you date the son of your manager in Los Angeles, get cat-called frequently about it by the knowledgeable outfield fans, get traded for refusing to marry a female, only to go to Oakland, where your teammates are extremely hard on you because of your sexual identity, your old managers do little to stop them, and you get a new manager in the building, who can think only of the word ‘faggot’ as a description of you to your new teammates, you are the first openly gay athlete in American team sports, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t care what Google says.

It had to have felt awful for Glenn to have come back to baseball, in hopes that things would get better under a new manager, only to be met with this on his first day back.

With this new perspective, it tugs at the heartstrings even more when Glenn messes his knee up in spring training in 1980, and Billy Martin uses that knee injury as an excuse to put him in the minors and never bring him back. That’s a gut punch.

Actually, it’s more like a kick in the head.

The goal for Glenn all along had been to prevent his sexuality from precluding him his chance in the Major Leagues, and look where we’ve wound up in the end. There is no path forward for Glenn with Billy Martin heading the Oakland Athletics, so he retires from baseball a second time, without ever truly fulfilling his goal of making the world see that a gay man can play baseball too, and that just sucks.

There’s no other way to say it. The fact that Glenn Burke failed to truly accomplish his goal is heartbreaking. It feels like you feel watching an anvil being dropped through a beautiful glass sculpture. It’s a representation that sometimes in real life, the bad guys win, which leads me into a serious discussion about the baddest guy of all.

Normally in sports parlance, that sequence of words is a compliment, but in this case it’s not. I promise you it’s not. There is one man I blame for all this, but to understand in full my reasons why, I must go back to when the colour barrier was broken in baseball.

Baseball’s colour barrier was always an odd thing. There had not always been a colour barrier in baseball, before Jackie Robinson came along. There was an American League baseball team literally named after Native American star Louis Sockalexis. You may have heard of them, they were called the Cleveland Indians.

This name was not honourary to Sockalexis. It was always derogatory, but that does not change the fact that they were named in direct reference to him, which means that a man well known to be Native American, who faced significant racism in his playing days for being Native American, had a significant role in the history of the franchise, which everybody acknowledged, because it was the name of the team. This spits in the face of the incorrect belief of some that a colour barrier had always existed in baseball, before 1947.

Nevertheless, malicious leadership had allowed that shameful cloud to descend over the game, not to broken until judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis died, and was replaced with Happy Chandler. When Branch Rickey made it known that he was about to use Jackie Robinson, and that baseball’s colour barrier was about to be broken, there was an owners’ meeting, where all 15 MLB owners that were not Branch Rickey agreed in a 15-1 vote that allowing Jackie Robinson to play was ‘a hazard to baseball.’

As a result of this unified opposition, Branch Rickey stated that he would not play Jackie Robinson unless he had the full support of the commissioner, in essence putting the colour barrier into the hands of one man, Happy Chandler, who was a real man, so took the necessary steps to let it die. If Jackie Robinson had come along under the tenure of Judge Landis, he would’ve been a lifelong Negro Leaguer. It was the right man in the right place, in the form of Happy Chandler, that allowed baseball’s colour barrier to fall, which is what has me feeling such vitriol for the man that could’ve done the same thing for Glenn Burke.

Bowie Kuhn.

Bowie Kuhn was the baseball commissioner throughout Glenn Burke’s entire professional baseball career, and as the head of baseball, he knew exactly what was going on in Los Angeles. He could’ve been the Happy Chandler of this story. He did not require any permission from anybody. It would’ve taken one comment from Bowie Kuhn to the media in favour of Glenn, saying that he was willing to support Glenn, to change the sports landscape forever.

Bowie Kuhn never made that comment.

I’m not saying he was anti-gay. Bowie Kuhn was a pro-LGBTQ person, by the standards of the 1970s, but Glenn Burke was not a hill he was willing to die on, in the way that Jackie Robinson was for Happy Chandler. Chandler did die on that hill, being removed as baseball commissioner just as quickly as the owners could get rid of him in retaliation for what he’d done, but he could not be removed until after he had opened the door. Nobody could ever say a black man couldn’t play baseball, because Jackie Robinson was doing it.

This was a once in a generation chance for Bowie Kuhn to be the Happy Chandler of a different story, to integrate baseball in an entirely different way, and he was not willing to do it. Don’t get me wrong. He wanted to do it, but he was not willing to pay for it with his job, like Happy Chandler did for Jackie Robinson, and as a result of one man’s inaction, MLB remains unintegrated.

In the nearly 50 years since Glenn Burke’s final Major League plate appearance on June 4, 1979, there have been over 10000 different MLB baseball players to step into a batter’s box. Not one of them have been an openly gay male. All due respect to players like Billy Bean, but nobody has been public enough with their sexuality that it was a commonly known fact inside (if not outside) baseball since Glenn Burke did it.

Depending on time, between three and five percent of the American male population are gay. That means that there have been gay baseball players since Glenn Burke. That is a guarantee, and in probabilistic terms, there’s better than a 50/50 chance that there’s been more than 100 gay males in MLB since 1979.

Not one of them have felt comfortable enough to become the first openly gay ballplayer since Glenn Burke, because baseball (represented at the top by Bowie Kuhn) had the chance to tell the world that being an openly gay ballplayer was okay, and baseball allowed that chance to pass them by.

It is now 46 years later, and that chance has not come up again.

What I say all the time in the His Year articles about the players is also true about the leagues. Sometimes you only get one chance, and if you let that chance slip through your fingers, there is not always a second one forthcoming.

Glenn Burke said it best himself:

‘I think everybody pretended not to hear me. It just was not a story they were ready to hear.’

This is the truth, but I append my own bit of truth to the end of it. If baseball waited until people were ‘ready’ for the colour barrier to be broken, do you think it would’ve ever been broken? Look around you. It’s 2025, and people worldwide are still not ready to break colour barriers.

Baseball (and sports in general) will never be ready to face this. Not until somebody forces them to be ready. The chance was there in the late 70s. It was allowed to slip away, and because of that, hundreds of athletes have had to keep the secret that even the Los Angeles Dodgers couldn’t keep, and who knows how many hundreds more gave up on their dreams altogether?

Think of all the kids playing youth sports. Depending upon your age, this can be yourself, or it can be your children. What kind of response do you think they would get if they told their teammates they’re a gay male? I can tell you that on the baseball teams I grew up playing on, there would not have been acceptance had I come out as a gay man. That’s just sports culture in general. I’m not sure how it is now, but ten years ago, that would not have worked for me, and ten years ago is long after Glenn Burke was finished playing baseball.

That is not Bowie Kuhn’s fault individually, but it simultaneously is Bowie Kuhn’s fault individually, just like if Happy Chandler had vetoed Jackie Robinson, it would’ve been his fault individually, even though there were 15 owners and mountains of fans pulling against him. When you’re the man at the top, the responsibility falls on you.

I often wonder if this weighed on Bowie Kuhn, as he spent much of his retirement volunteering at an AIDS hospice. I’m not going to assume repentance on Bowie’s part, but I will say that if he were looking for a way to make up for his mistake in 1979, there are few better ways to do so than living exactly how Bowie Kuhn lived once he was removed as baseball commissioner.

This was a missed chance to change sports culture forever, and while I can only surmise the feelings of Bowie Kuhn on the matter, it’s not a guess that Glenn Burke spent the remainder of his life allowing this missed chance to eat him alive.

It’s a sad truth about the sports world that if Glenn had been everything he was projected to be, if he’d won the World Series, won the Rookie of The Year, won the MVP, the gay barrier would’ve been broken. Baseball would’ve had no choice. He would’ve been front page. There would’ve been a Sports Illustrated cover with a rainbow, and Glenn Burke holding a baseball bat.

Glenn spent his whole life after baseball pondering this possibility. What if there was something he could’ve done different? How many people could he have helped?

It shouldn’t be on the shoulders of one man to be the champion of an entire community, but Glenn took this all on himself, because he was God in the Castro. One of their own, starting in the World Series. This was not just lip service either. Glenn was living the life they lived. He physically lived in the Castro. He got a pride symbol (the high five) worldwide. He was truly one of theirs, on top of the world. It felt too good to be true, and in the end, it was too good to be true.

For however much I may say about his good intentions, Glenn Burke was not born to be Jackie Robinson. The position he was put into weighed on him. He eventually did find a paper that would tell his story publicly in 1982. He was hoping that at last making the announcement would get him back into baseball, or at least make him some money. It got him neither, and Glenn transitioned into being a multiple time Gold medallist at the Gay Olympics, but after being crippled in a car accident in 1987, his life as an athlete was over.

This was truly the end of the line for Glenn.

Professional athletes living without sport is often hard enough, but Glenn just could not handle all the pressure he put on himself. He could not cope with the having failed to truly be the first openly gay man in baseball. He could not deal with the reality of what his life as an athlete had accomplished, or the lack thereof, so he turned to drugs to help him through it, becoming a victim of the cocaine epidemic in the 1980s, and eventually contracting AIDS.

The man who used to light up the clubhouse now was a man who incited sadness in all who had to accept what he had become. The man whose temper you used to want on your side in any fight was now feared, even by loved ones, for his inability to control himself. For one final quote in the words of Dusty Baker, ‘I recognise the voice, but I don’t recognise the man.’

Glenn Burke spent his final years homeless, panhandling in the Castro. He became so infamous for this that word got out in the community not to give him any money, because he never paid back. By the end of his life, in constant mental (from his failed baseball pursuits) and physical (from AIDS lesions) pain, he had come around to the position that he wanted two things: 1) to die already, and 2) to go back and give basketball a chance. He had supreme confidence to the end that he could’ve made it in the NBA, and broken barriers there. Near the end of his life, this became just another thing for Glenn to beat himself up over, so who knows how truthful this regret was, but who am I to doubt him? This is a man that never failed at anything.

Except the one thing he truly wanted to do.

Glenn allowed this one failure to overcome all of his successes, and ultimately ruin his life. Nowadays, Glenn Burke is barely a ghost, even during pride month. If circumstances had been just slightly different, he could’ve been an icon, not just in June but in all the other months too. Jackie Robinson Day is not in February. We could’ve had Glenn Burke Day in August. By the way, we still can have Glenn Burke Day in August. There is nothing stopping baseball from doing it.

Nothing except their own attitudes, which is where I have to get into one final shameful element of this story.

Even with everything that’s happened in the 46 years since Glenn had his final plate appearance on June 4, 1979, baseball has not changed their position on him. Baseball in 2025 acknowledges the existence of Glenn Burke, but does not promote that existence. They remember him, but do not encourage others to do the same. Baseball is still not asking and not telling about Glenn, just like they’ve been doing since 1977.

There is a tribute video to Glenn Burke that exists on the MLB YouTube channel. The Oakland Athletics’ pride night festivities were called ‘Glenn Burke Night’ for years. The Dodgers honoured him in 2022. Baseball remembers him. Nobody is saying they don’t, but baseball remembers Glenn Burke on the same terms they’ve remembered Pete Rose for so many years, which generally means only when it will make them money. When Glenn Burke’s name will not make them money, he doesn’t exist in the eyes of baseball, just like it’s always been.

When Glenn Burke was alive, there was no help forthcoming for him from anybody in baseball. He was left to face his demons, and eventually succumb to them, alone. Now that Glenn Burke is not alive, baseball announced that they were going to honour him at the 2014 All-Star game, but did not do it.

That is not a joke.

They pushed his long overdue acknowledgment to an off-site press conference, before the game.

As little as ten years ago, baseball false advertised that they were going to quit the hush campaign. They said they were going to honour, acknowledge, promote, apologise, or say literally anything about Glenn Burke during the 2014 All-Star game, and they did not do it.

What do you even say to that?

The full broadcast of the 2014 All-Star game is out there. You can watch it. In the endless All-Star pregame show, there was nothing. During the game, there was nothing. Glenn Burke’s family was in attendance at the game. The TV cameras never showed them. There was not a word said about Glenn on the TV broadcast of the 2014 All-Star game, and I cannot describe how shameful that is.

I don’t know if this was a matter of the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing, or an intentional kick in the teeth to a man that’d already been dead for 19 years (something I would not put past the notoriously vindictive baseball establishment), but to me, honouring somebody at the All-Star game means an on-field ceremony, either during or before the game, but just like Glenn Burke bait and switched baseball during his playing career, they bait and switched him after his death.

They bait and switched all of us, and some of us lost a lot of respect and love for baseball that day.

It’s not that there was no ceremony. That was the norm. Baseball’s non-acceptance of the LGBTQ community had been just as non-secret of a secret as Glenn Burke’s original secret was, but to say that you were going to turn over a new leaf, to say that you were going to honour North American sports’ first openly gay player, and then to do it at an off-site press conference, minimising the number of people were going to see it. That made very clear what baseball’s priorities were, and according to this sports writer, they were not the right ones.

There were plenty of sponsorships read during the 2014 All-Star game, but baseball couldn’t find any time for Glenn Burke. Not five minutes. Not even five seconds. Nothing. There were billboards behind home plate (that were not electronic back then), visible for the whole game. One promoted Jordan brand. One promoted Target, but when it comes to honouring a man who tried his best to bring a whole new community of people into the game? No time for it. Baseball had to move that acknowledgement off-site, and off TV.

Glenn Burke deserves a real acknowledgement. He deserves a real ceremony. He deserves to actually be honoured for the brave soul that he was. I understand that it’s not going to be fun to confront the fact that Glenn ended up a homeless cocaine addict in the Castro, with no help from baseball or anybody in it, but baseball is going to have to confront this reality eventually.

If they do it while Dusty Baker is still alive, they can have him there to talk about positive memories. They can have people like me praising baseball for finally taking a real first step in the acceptance of the LGBTQ community, which as far as I’m concerned has not been taken, and cannot be taken until baseball properly acknowledges Glenn. It can be a tremendously positive moment. It doesn’t have to have a negative vibe.

Inevitably, people will yell that honouring Glenn is virtue signaling, but it is not mere lip service to pay adequate tribute to a pioneer in your game, and in this case a pioneer in every game. NBA teams should acknowledge and honour Glenn Burke. NFL teams should do it, because it was not merely baseball culture he was trying to change. It was sports culture.

They don’t honour Glenn. Nobody honours Glenn, because his own sport cannot swallow their prejudice enough to give the acknowledgement that he, and not Jason Collins, and not anybody else, but Glenn Burke, was the first openly gay athlete in American team sports, and discuss openly just how important of a man he could’ve been to the history of sport (not baseball, but sport) in North America, had Bowie Kuhn had just a little bit more conviction.

Baseball will not do this, because to do so requires the acknowledgement that baseball buried his story 46 years ago, and is still burying it today. In a way, this saga has been just as traumatising to baseball as it was to Glenn. Once again, no one human in particular is truly at fault for this, but baseball, as a concept, simply cannot look itself in the mirror and admit the chance that the industry missed 46 years ago. To them, it’s better to virtue signal a bit in 2014 when the pressure got high, but generally keep the lid on and just not tell anybody about it.

This hang up has forever been preventing baseball from fully embracing a pro-pride stance, because how do you do that while also not bringing up the Glenn Burke story, so we’re left in this awkward holding pattern, where it’s more or less universally accepted that homosexuality is not okay in baseball, even in 2025, because if that acceptance were not universal, one of the at least tens and probably hundreds of non-heterosexual humans that have been on an MLB diamond since 1979 would’ve felt comfortable to be who they truly were in the clubhouse and in the public.

They don’t feel comfortable doing that, and the root of that weed goes as deep as Glenn Burke, and his powerful story, that people were not ready to hear. Glenn Burke wanted to be the first gay man in baseball. Baseball did not allow him that privilege, and until we at least acknowledge the sins of our past, we will never be able to move forward.

This passes the buck onto Major League Baseball. It’s Pride Month now, and baseball knows who Glenn Burke was. They know it too well. All they need to do is address him. It would take one day to correct all the Google results, which universally make incorrect claims that anybody other than Glenn was the first publicly gay male in a North American team sport, to correct all the wounds of the past, and to move forward with a true feeling of acceptance.

All of that can be done with one ceremony. One speech from Rob Manfred, but I want to make clear that it hasn’t been done yet. The Google results are still incorrect. The fences between MLB and the LGBTQ community are not mended. Not to me they’re not.

I can tell you the story of Glenn Burke. I just have told you the story of Glenn Burke, but my platform is only so big. Baseball has universal grip on the baseball fan. Glenn’s story is one that in 1979, people were not ready to hear, but it’s 2025 now. We’re ready to hear it from you, baseball. The ball is in your court. Make this right.

Thanks so much for reading.