Piazza denies he's gay

Which won't keep fans from taunting him about it, or the Atlanta paper from bringing it up... There was a story in the Post, Page Six, yesterday, where Bobby Valentine (the Mets' manager) was saying that he thought baseball was ready for an openly gay ballplayer. Speculation immediately surfaced that someone on the Mets must be ready to come out, otherwise why would Valentine bring it up? (Why not?) And then it was decided that the Gay Met must be Piazza, probably because he's good-looking, single, and has odd facial hair.

Anyway, is baseball ready for the gay Jackie Robinson? I don't know. There are a lot of neanderthal attitudes in the game. At any rate, he's going to have to be a star, someone like Piazza, because a team wouldn't go through the hassle for a marginal player.

There is of course more than one gay major league baseball player. I don't know what study to believe on the number of gays in the general population, but with 750 players on the active rosters (plus maybe another 50 on the disabled list) there could be anywhere from six to six dozen. There was a brief tempest about a year about about a gay magazine editor (for Out, I believe) who talked about his boyfriend, a closeted major league player. That player was probably not the one the Post was talking about, because he supposedly played for a team on the East Coast but not the Mets or Yankees.