William Daro Bean (May 11, 1964 – August 6, 2024) was an American professional baseball player. He played in Major League Baseball (MLB) as an outfielder for the Detroit Tigers (1987–1989), Los Angeles Dodgers (1989), and San Diego Padres (1993–1995), as well as the Kintetsu Buffaloes of Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) in 1992. In July 2014, he was named MLB's first ambassador for inclusion, having publicly come out as gay in 1999. In January 2016, he became MLB's vice president, ambassador for inclusion and was senior vice president and special assistant to the commissioner.
Early life
Bean's father, Bill Bean, and mother, Linda Robertson, grew up on the same street and were classmates at Santa Ana High School in Santa Ana, California. The couple married while Linda was pregnant, then separated when Billy was six months old. Linda married Ed Kovac, a police officer with three children. Linda initially worked as a uniformed officer, but because women could not be in the same police departments as their husbands, she quit her job upon remarriage. When he was a child, Bean's grandmother divorced his maternal grandfather, and he has three aunts on his mother's side of the family. where he graduated as valedictorian, played football under coach Tom Nice, He enrolled at Loyola Marymount University on an athletic scholarship to play college baseball for the Loyola Marymount Lions.
Though the Yankees offered Bean a $55,000 signing bonus, Bean was persuaded by his college coach, Dave Snow, to return for LMU for his senior year.
Bean graduated from LMU with a degree in Business Administration. Bean played in 10 games for the Tigers after he was promoted back to the major leagues in August 1988. He played in nine games for the Tigers in the 1989 season. He batted .197 for the Dodgers in 51 games, and was demoted to the minor leagues. Bean signed a minor league contract with the San Diego Padres before the 1993 season. He was promoted back to the major leagues. and was a board member of the Gay and Lesbian Athletics Foundation. He appeared in a 2009 episode of Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List, showing Griffin several homes.
In 2007, Bean was hired as a consultant by Scout Productions, the team of David Collins and Michael Williams, who produced Bravo's Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, for their next project with Showtime entitled The Beard. The project was to be a romantic comedy about a gay professional baseball player who enters into a relationship with a woman to survive in the sports world; Showtime did not go forward with the series.
Bean starred in a MTV episode of Made, he was an actor in an episode of the sitcom Frasier, and appeared as himself on the HBO series Arli$$ in the 2002 episode "Playing it Safe".
Personal life
Reflecting on his childhood, Bean remarked, "I've always been gay. I was gay since birth, and I just knew that there was something different about me but I couldn't quite put my finger on it until I think it was 13 years old." The Bean-Amato wedding was held on the Bluff at Loyola and attended by 300 guests, including 20 major league baseball players. In January 1993, while Bean and his wife were visiting her parents in the Washington, DC suburbs, Bean met his future partner Sam Madani, an Iranian immigrant, in the gym showers at a Maryland health club.
Bean and Madani kept their relationship and living arrangement secret from Bean's MLB teammates. When Bean's Padres teammates, Brad Ausmus and Trevor Hoffman, stopped by unannounced to Bean and Madani's condo, Madani had to hide in the car for approximately three hours for fear that they would be identified as a gay couple.
Bean retired after the 1995 MLB season, and gradually came out as gay to his parents and friends. He came out publicly to Lydia Martin of the Miami Herald in 1999, becoming the second Major League Baseball player to publicly come out as gay; Following Burke's death in 1995, Bean became close with Burke's family.
After leaving baseball, Bean moved to Miami Beach, Florida, for 15 years.
In 2003, Bean released a memoir titled Going the Other Way: Lessons from a Life In and Out of Major League Baseball.
Bean was appointed MLB's first "Ambassador for Inclusion" on July 15, 2014. In this role, Bean counseled David Denson, who became the first minor league player signed to an MLB organization to come out as gay. He later became the league's senior vice president for diversity, equity and inclusion. At the time of his death, Bean was married to Greg Baker, a doctor, Manchester, New Hampshire native, and Boston Red Sox fan.