A big step! Bryan Ruby is the first active professional baseball player to ‘come out of the closet’

For quite a long time, MLB has sought that the league is one that is assumed herself as a melting pot of diversity in all humanly possible aspects: Of so much skin color, nationality, gender, among other variables. But although there are already women on Major League Baseball teams and players of multiple nationalities and ethnicities playing, perhaps the pending issue is the LGBTQ + community.

Previously, there was only the background of Billy Bean and Glenn Burke as the only professional players to come out as gay men, with both going public as their careers were over. However, today we are faced with history, since for the first time an active player “has come out of the closet”, in the case of the independent league player, Bryan Ruby, who plays for the former affiliate of the San Francisco Giants, the Salem -Keizer Volcanoes.

In an interview with USA Today’s Scott Gleeson, the 25-year-old Ruby steeled herself to come out of the closet and admit to the world of professional baseball that she is gay, making history in the process and hopes her ad will serve all other professional players. who are pressured and forced to hide who they are for fear of reprisals and homophobic behavior against them.

I have been in the closet for over 10 years and it has been a constant struggle for me. I used to hate myself, I hated what I felt. Many people told me ‘be careful who you tell about yours’ or ‘they don’t need to know about your personal life’. The best way to describe it as an athlete is as if you were trying to run with a very heavy vest over you.

Ruby, like many other minor league players, believed that he could not continue playing baseball after the cancellation of the 2020 MiLB season due to Covid-19, and despite everything he has a second career as a country singer in Nashville that helps him to lean on. Additionally, with his team’s disaffiliation from the minor league system for 2021, the future remained uncertain, but the Volcanoes formed the independent league of Oregon, where he continues to play to this day, having played international ball in many other countries. with the intact dream of making it to the Major Leagues one day.

Gabriel Delgado

I started as a rookie on Al Bat in early 2018 and I am going into my third season covering Major League Baseball as a web reporter. I am a fan of the San Francisco Giants, a number one defender of Barry Bonds and a critic of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Fernando Tatis Jr., Juan Soto and Ronald Acuña are the future of baseball, Mike Trout is overrated, and the Astros deserved to be taken away from the World Series for cheating. Besides baseball, I also enjoy soccer, football, basketball, and just about any other game that includes a ball or a ball. I am also an amateur musician, penniless gamer and very nerdy. Graduated in journalism from the University of Guadalajara, I graduated in 2017. Born in the shrimp capital of the world, Escuinapa, Sinaloa. I lived in Australia for a while; i survived giant spiders, tasmanian devils and fought a kangaroo and didn’t die trying.

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