Bob Collins
Another first for gay men in sports; Dale Scott became the first active baseball umpire to come out as gay.
He tells Outsports it wasn’t much of a secret.
“I’ve worked three World Series, I’ve worked the playoffs consistently, I’ve been a crew chief for 12 years. Obviously, if they had an issue with my life, it would be shown in my career with lack of assignments,” he said.
“My thought process was,” Scott told Outsports in his first interview on the subject, “is that there’s a story about my career and how I got started in umpiring and they’re talking to people I have known since junior high and it didn’t seem right to have a whole story and pictures without a picture of Mike and I, someone who’s been with me through this entire process. We met the October after my first year in the big leagues.
“Obviously, when I sent that picture to Jeff, I knew exactly what it meant. In a small way, this was opening that door in a publication that wasn’t going to be circulated nationwide. It could be picked up, but it’s not Time magazine. I made that decision to go ahead and do it because I felt it was the right thing to do.
“I realized that it could open a Pandora’s Box, but this is not a surprise to Major League Baseball, the people I work for. It’s not a surprise to the umpire staff. Until Mike and I got married last November, he was my same-sex domestic partner and had his own MLB I.D. and was on my insurance policy.
But he’s not sure how fans will react.
“People scream at me because I’m an umpire,” he said. The last thing I want is people screaming at me because I’m gay. I’m an umpire who happens to be gay. I’m not trying to be some gay person who happens to be an umpire.”
Related: Dale Scott’s news is good for us all (Rob Neyer).
