Brad Ausmus sits in the Yankee Stadium dugout, watching the rain and preparing for a doubleheader on Wednesday that starts in a few hours. The baseball workflow doesn’t leave much time to think about life and death, but Ausmus takes a few minutes to talk about the good friend he lost the day before.
Billy Boon was only 60 when he died of acute myeloid leukemia, but his impact on the game, first as a respected role player and later as senior vice president of diversity, equity and inclusion for Major League Baseball, prompted an outpouring of grief.
For the Yankees’ bench coach, the loss was personal. Bean and Ausmus were roommates with the San Diego Padres in the 1990s. When the retired Bean came out as gay in 1999, Ausmus was the only player to appear on ABC News’ “20/20” program to support him.
“My mother raised me to accept others,” Ausmus says. “Everyone has the right to be happy, as long as they don’t hurt others. And Billy was a friend to me, for everything.”
Yet, during his active career, Bean did not feel comfortable telling Ausmus the truth about who he was.
“I think he was scared [being out] would derail his baseball career, and that was the most important thing to him,” Ausmus said.
Unfortunately, Bean may have been right. Even three decades later, in 2022, the then-Mets outfielder Mark Canha to be precise: “I’m probably in the minority here when I say I’m an ally of [the LGBTQ] community.”
Now imagine carrying that secret with you into the ’90s, “don’t ask, don’t tell.” In Bean’s 2003 book, “Going the Other Way,” he writes about the shame he felt after asking his partner to hide when teammates stopped by for beers. When that partner died suddenly, Bean found he couldn’t attend the funeral.
The same day Bean suffered that loss, the Padres sent him to the minor leagues. Ausmus tried to console him by saying that “management has no idea what they’re doing,” but had no idea why his friend seemed so upset.
Bean retired after the 1995 season at age 31, despite believing he had four or five more years of play. He didn’t feel he could be his authentic self in baseball. He drifted to Miami, in exile from the game he loved.
“After he moved to Miami, he got into modeling and I saw him in an ad for fitness equipment and texted him, and he responded to me,” Ausmus says. “Then he stopped responding for a couple of years.”
In 1999, Ausmus saw the article in the Miami Herald in which Bean came out.
“I had two reactions, really,” he says. “One, I wish Billy had enough confidence in me that I could handle this information to tell me and unburden myself. But the other side of it is that it would have been difficult to share this secret with him. I was 24, 25 years old at the time. Certainly at a more mature age, I could definitely handle it. Honestly, I think I could handle it. I just don’t know how easy it would have been.”
Shortly after, Ausmus appeared on the 20/20 segment where Bean came out to a national audience. He also joined Bean and his former Padres teammate Trevor Hoffman for a dinner in California.
“It was just three friends having dinner,” Ausmus says. “The subject of him being gay came up. We talked about it. It definitely wasn’t the biggest part of the conversation. It was more about what he had done, what was going on in his life. Him being gay was just part of the conversation.”
At that dinner, Ausmus said, as Bean recounts in his book, “Next time you’re in town, man, let’s go surfing like we used to.”
“’Dude, let’s go surfing,’” Bean writes. “That simple sentence was music to my ears … But their kindness also reminded me what a fool I had been. After all, I had lived with Brad for two years. I remembered all the times I wanted to tell him but held back for fear he wouldn’t know how to handle it. Why had I insisted on attributing the worst possible motives to the people I loved most?”
It’s heavy stuff, but Ausmus and Bean came through it with a renewed friendship that lasted another 25 years.
After working in the restaurant industry and real estate, Bean took the job with MLB in 2014.
“Besides getting married, there’s no doubt in my mind that getting back to baseball was the highlight of his life,” Ausmus said. “He felt like he left baseball too early, and he was so happy to be back.”
In that role, Bean spoke to all 30 clubs — no easy task, given the attitudes of many players toward the LGBTQ community. His first stop was in Lakeland, Florida, where the Detroit Tigers were holding spring training. The manager of those Tigers? Brad Ausmus.
“It wasn’t an accident,” Ausmus says. “I confronted him about it. I said, ‘Why are you here first? Is it because you have a familiar face?’ And he said, ‘Yes, absolutely.’ Because he was nervous.
“Even though he had been a major league baseball player, he was nervous about being in this role in front of major league baseball players because it can be a little intimidating when you’ve been in a major league clubhouse. And yes, he admitted that he chose Lakeland and the Tigers because he knew I was there and that I would support him.”
In that job, as in life itself, Bean was a warm presence and knew the game, two qualities that served him well in the clubhouses.
“He was very careful with his words,” Ausmus says. “There wasn’t a lot of detail or terminology that would create disagreement. He was talking more broadly about people being treated the same, not necessarily just homosexuals, but just people who aren’t necessarily the same as everyone else.
“I talked to him a lot when he was in this role at MLB. He was very cautious about some of the initiatives that MLB wanted to launch. He didn’t want to divide the space.”
You can draw your own conclusions about locker rooms from Bean’s need to keep his message relatively generic. But Ausmus says his friend felt authentically valued by MLB and commissioner Rob Manfred. He loved his work and worked through much of his illness.
Ausmus last saw Bean ten days ago. “I was afraid it would happen [the final meeting]”, he says. “He was in a lot of pain, very uncomfortable.”
It was a far cry from the world-class athlete Ausmus had met more than 30 years earlier.
“He always loved the game,” Ausmus says, taking a sip from a bottle of water and still looking out at the field. “He was that tough, hard-working utility player who would do anything to help the team win.”
