Tag: Yankees

Going Places

I first met Billy Bean during the summer of 2014, when I was writing a piece about his visit (along with Brian Cashman and Jean Afterman) to a high school for largely LGBT youths, many of whom had been kicked out of their houses. I knew right that I wanted to spend more time with this guy.

Bean’s story is, alone, extremely compelling. He was a good major leaguer, never great, but he was driven to near madness by the secret he was forced to keep. He was a gay man in the straightest of worlds. When tragedy struck, it was too much to handle; the stresses, the rollercoaster between the majors and the minors, the hiding — they all became too much to handle. He just quit.

And then, he found himself. He got to live openly. He got to be a person. He was happy. Eventually, more than a decade later, MLB reached out, interested in having him be their face to the LGBT community. He accepted, and since then, he’s been traveling the country to spread MLB’s message of inclusion.

This spring, I spent about three days with him. We had a long talk over dinner, I followed him to the Yankees’ spring training facility, where he met with the organization’s minor leaguers, and we visited with Dr. Richard Lapchick from the University of Central Florida, where Billy addressed a group of graduate students. I was totally overwhelmed by how impressive Billy is, how captivating his message can be, and how people respond to him.

But I also was really taken by the emotional heft of his story. I did my best to get that across in here, but I wonder if I did it well enough. Billy’s a strong dude, and it’s very clear that there’s nothing he’s afraid of. But there was a real heaviness to his tone when we were talking about the sadder, more difficult parts of his life. He has probably told this story hundreds of times, and he wrote about it in his book, “Going The Other Way,” but he was still near tears as he told me about Sam, about his own personal demons, about his refusal to let his teammates — his friends! — know who he really was.

I can’t even begin to guess what his future holds, but I’m certain that the work he’s doing is going to have amazing and important results for so many people.

http://m.yankees.mlb.com/news/article/175816378/billy-bean-brings-mlb-message-of-inclusion?topicid=163658034

Bit by Bit, Putting it Together

For the 2016 Yankees Yearbook (and the Spring Training issue of our magazine), I was assigned to write about the Yankees’ offseason acquisitions. About a decade ago — even less, really, when you consider some recent offseasons like 2008-09 and 2013-14 — it would have seemed crazy to think of how uneventful the past few months were in the Yankees front office. For the first time since free agency began, the club didn’t sign a single player to a major league offer.

As such, putting the story together was a bit more challenging than I would have originally thought. How much was there to say about adding a fourth outfielder in Aaron Hicks, a castoff middle infielder in Starlin Castro, and a closer facing discipline for domestic abuse in Aroldis Chapman.

Obviously, there’s no way to write about the Yankees’ offseason in a way that makes it seem like the club signed David Price and Jason Heyward. But in talking to people around the office, I got to understand some of the philosophical foundation on which the offseason was built. I think the story that resulted was a compelling look at a quiet — but possibly quite impactful — few months.

Every Little Thing

This is a story that I wrote for a Yankees Magazine package on Alex Rodriguez’s 3,000th hit. I was tasked with putting together a list of A-Rod’s most memorable career hits, and was able to get the Yankees’ slugger to weigh in them, offering insight into what made them special and particularly noteworthy.

In deciding how to put it together, I was torn between a simple write-thru, and a set out list. In the end, I settled on the latter, shifting between items that were simple quotes of A-Rod’s and others that I wrote out a short narrative. It’s a very simple story, but I was pleased with how it came out, both in terms of the content and its visual appeal.