They didn’t call it gay, but early pro baseball history with rife with innuendo

Every summer, my Pittsburgh Steelers pack their gear and head to Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where Rolling Rock beer and Arnold Palmer were born. Multimillionaire athletes trade their mansions for shabby dorm rooms, saggy twin beds and swampy shared bathrooms.

The team has been practicing at St. Vincent’s since 1966, only skipping once in 2020.

It’s a throwback, for sure. But it also got me thinking about a version of that arrangement that wasn’t temporary at all, and wasn’t quaint: the world professional baseball players actually lived in for the first several decades of the 20th century.

As Major League Baseball rounds into the stretch run of another season, it’s worth remembering that the sport has a distinction neither the NFL nor NBA can claim, and not a proud one. No active MLB player has ever come out as gay while still playing.

Not once in the sport’s entire history. Other leagues have had their pioneers, however belated and however few. Baseball, ostensibly the national pastime, has had none.

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I love baseball history and have won several trivia contests because I’m a glutton for statistics. For example, J. Owen “Chief” Wilson, of my beloved Pirates, holds the MLB record for triples in one season, with 36 in 1912. I can tell you Ty Cobb’s lifetime batting average, Babe’s Ruth’s lifetime RBI total, and Cy Young’s lifetime wins, but I digress.

As I lounged by a pool on an off-day last week, I started Googling the early days of baseball, not so much the statistics, but what the environment was like, specifically, were there any gay players, rumors of gay players, or anything along those lines.

It won’t surprise you to learn that there isn’t much. Actually, hardly anything at all to be honest, but I did discover a few things that were worth taking note of.

Men living with men

There were players in those days who lived together, much like the Steelers are living now, in all-male boarding houses, which is detailed in Lawrence Ritter’s famous book “The Glory of Their Times.”

In the Deadball Era, from the turn of the 20th century into the 1920s, ballclubs didn’t fly players to spring training or put them up in private suites. Teams spent months in a single city, and players, especially rookies and lower-paid players, settled into all-male boarding houses near the ballparks, and it was entirely ordinary for two teammates to room together, sometimes for years at a stretch.

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Managers of the era, men like John McGraw and Connie Mack, ran their clubs less like modern coaching staffs and more like boarding-school headmasters, which is detailed in baseball historian Cait Murphy’s book, “Crazy ’08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball.”

They believed a team’s chemistry depended on enforcing a particular model of behavior, and they policed it accordingly.

McGraw, for instance, assigned Giants coach Jesse Burkett to be New York Giants pitcher Phil Douglas’s guardian and road roommate, charged with keeping him away from alcohol. Douglas later complained that McGraw had hired Burkett “to follow me around”; when Douglas disappeared during a drinking binge, McGraw sent Burkett and two detectives to track him down.

Something to conceal

In the wider world these players inhabited, a man’s relationships with other men could itself become something to conceal. Historian George Chauncey, in his book, “Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940,” documents a 1919 case in which a man living in a New York rooming house stopped allowing several young men to visit because he feared his landlady would “get wise,” a fear that could cost him both his room and his job.

That same policing of masculine behavior showed up inside the clubhouse. When Giants third baseman Arthur Shafer arrived in 1909, he was described as a “quiet and respectable” young man; veteran teammate Cy Seymour greeted him with mock kisses and christened him “Tillie,” a feminine nickname that stuck. 

Shafer was subsequently “ridden unmercifully.” Charles “Lady” Baldwin was similarly tagged by teammates because he refused to smoke, swear or join the drinking bouts that were routine among ballplayers of his era. 

In a clubhouse culture that prized toughness, drinking and other traditional markers of masculine behavior, even being too quiet, too respectable or too unwilling to join in could make a player stand out.

And the stakes of that policing were typical during that time period. While Franklin D. Roosevelt was assistant secretary of the Navy, he ran an entrapment operation against a gay subculture in Newport, Rhode Island, using enlisted decoys to lure in sailors and civilians.

Exposure meant potential imprisonment, professional ruin and social exile. In this environment, baseball had every commercial incentive to protect its wholesome image.

Little has changed in many ways

What’s remarkable is how little seems to have changed in the century since. The most recent notable public flashpoint came in May 2002, when Mets catcher Mike Piazza felt compelled to hold a news conference to deny speculation that he was gay. 

It’s been another generation since, and the answer hasn’t changed, where the topic, if it ever surfaces, has to be swatted down.

Today, MLB has the trappings of modern inclusion, collectively bargained anti-discrimination protections, workplace conduct rules and an executive-level diversity office. 

What it doesn’t have, and hasn’t had in more than 100 years of boarding houses, hotel suites and clubhouses, is a single player willing to test whether any of that infrastructure would actually hold. 

So, if you’re sitting by a pool all day, like I did, looking for substantiated facts — or dirt, pardon the pun – on the history of gay players in MLB, you’re going to find nothing.

You will just have to use your imagination about what might have taken place in those male boarding houses 100 years ago.

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