Buried deep within this survey of Major League Baseball players on topics such as steroids and competitive imbalance is this nugget:
A strong majority of players, 353 to 73, said having a gay teammate wouldn’t bother them. “I’m sure I’ve had one at some point,” former Met and Yankee Robin Ventura said.
Now, as King Kaufman says, that doesn’t mean life is going to be beautiful for the first openly gay player, or even the first dozen openly gay players. It doesn’t mean those 353 players who said they wouldn’t be bothered would be happy about having a gay teammate, and it doesn’t mean that the roughly 25% of players who indicated they would have a problem (Kaufman counts the “no commenters” as having a problem) would keep quiet about it when it happens. It’s still a pretty darned good result, if you ask me, one that I bet would compare favorably to other sports and probably not badly to general workplace attitudes. We’re not at the end of the journey yet, but we really have come a long way.
This topic has generated much discussion in New York over the last few years, between Mike Piazza’s statement about how he would be comfortable with an openly gay teammate to the Broadway play “Take Me Out”, which was apparently inspired by his comments.
Now, if there was a poll regarding how comfortable ballplayers would be with a teammate that was married to a box turtle, then you might have something. 😉