Yankees’ Brad Ausmus remembers his close friend, the LGBTQ trailblazer Billy Bean

Brad Ausmus is sitting in the home dugout at Yankee Stadium, looking out at the rain and preparing for a Wednesday doubleheader that will begin in a few hours. The baseball workflow does not allow for much time to reflect on life and death, but Ausmus is taking a few minutes to talk about the close friend he lost the day before.

Billy Bean was just 60 when he succumbed to acute myeloid leukemia, but his impact on the game, first as a respected role player and later as the senior vice president for diversity, equity and inclusion for Major League Baseball, brought an outpouring of grief.

For the Yankees’ bench coach, the loss was personal. Bean and Ausmus were roommates as San Diego Padres in the 1990s. When Bean, in retirement, came out as gay in 1999, Ausmus was the only player who appeared on ABC News’ “20/20” program to support him.

“My mom raised me to be accepting of others,” Ausmus says. “Everyone has the right to be happy as long as they’re not hurting others. And Billy was a friend of mine in front of everything else.”

And yet, during his playing days, Bean was not comfortable telling Ausmus the truth about who he was.

“I think he was afraid [being out] would derail his baseball career, and that’s what was most important to him,” Ausmus says.

Unfortunately, Bean might have been right. Even three decades later, in 2022, then-Mets outfielder Mark Canha accurately said, “I’m probably in the minority here in saying I’m an ally to [the LGBTQ] community.”

Now imagine carrying that secret in the “don’t ask, don’t tell” ‘90s. In Bean’s 2003 book, “Going the Other Way,” he writes about the shame he felt after asking his live-in partner to hide when teammates dropped by for a beer. When that partner died suddenly, Bean felt he could not attend the funeral.

On the same day that Bean experienced that loss, the Padres sent him to the minor leagues. Ausmus tried to comfort him, saying “management doesn’t know what the hell it’s doing,” but had no idea why his friend seemed especially upset.

Bean retired after the 1995 season at age 31, despite believing he could play another four or five years. He did not feel that 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 dabbled in modeling, and I would see him in, like, an ad for exercise equipment and shoot him a message, and he’d answer me,” Ausmus says. “Then he stopped answering for a couple years.”

In 1999, Ausmus saw the Miami Herald article in which Bean came out.

“I kind of had two responses,” he says. “One, I wish Billy had enough faith in me that I could handle this information to tell me and to unburden himself. But then the other side is that it would have been difficult to have this secret with him. At that time, I was 24, 25 years old. Certainly at a more mature age, I definitely could handle it. Being honest, I think I would have handled it. I just don’t know how easy it would have been.”

Soon after, Ausmus appeared on the 20/20 segment in which Bean came out to a national audience. He also joined Bean and former Padres teammate Trevor Hoffman for a dinner in California.

“It was very much just three friends having dinner,” Ausmus says. “The topic of him being gay was broached. We talked about it. By no means was it the bulk of the conversation. It was more about what he had been doing, what was going on in his life. Him being gay was just a portion of the conversation.”

At that dinner, as Bean recalls in his book, Ausmus said, “The next time you’re in town, dude, let’s go surfing, just like the old days.”

“‘Dude, let’s go surfing,’” Bean writes. “That simple sentence was music to my ears … But their kindness also reminded me of what a fool I’d been. After all, I’d roomed with Brad for two years. I remembered all the times I’d wanted to tell him only to back off for fear that he wouldn’t know how to handle it. Why had I insisted on imputing the worst possible motives to the people I loved most?”

This is heavy stuff, but Ausmus and Bean emerged from it with a renewed friendship that lasted another 25 years.

After dabbling in the restaurant business and real estate, Bean took the MLB job in 2014.

“Other than getting married, there’s no question in my mind that getting back into baseball was the highest point in his life,” Ausmus says. “He felt like he had to leave the game too early, and he was so excited to be back.”

In that role, Bean addressed all 30 clubs — no easy task, given the attitudes of many players towards the LGBTQ community. His first stop was in Lakeland, Fla., where the Detroit Tigers held spring training. The manager of those Tigers? Brad Ausmus.

“That wasn’t an accident,” Ausmus says. “I called him on it. I said, ‘Why are you coming here first? Is it because you got a familiar face?’ And he said, ‘Yes, absolutely.’ Because he was nervous.

“Even though he had been a big league baseball player, he was nervous about standing up in front of big league baseball players in this role, because that can be a little intimidating if you’ve been in a big league clubhouse. And yeah, he admitted that he chose Lakeland and the Tigers because he knew I was there and he knew I’d have his back.”

In that job as in life, Bean was a warm presence, and he knew the game — two qualities that helped him in clubhouses.

“He was very careful with his words,” Ausmus says. “There were not a lot of specifics or terminology that would create dissension. He was speaking more broadly about people being treated the same, not necessarily just gay people, just people that aren’t necessarily the same as everyone else.

“I talked to him quite a bit while he was working at MLB in this position. He was very careful about some of the initiatives that MLB wanted to put forth. He didn’t want to divide the room.”

One can draw their own conclusions about locker rooms from the need for Bean to keep his message relatively generic. But Ausmus says that his friend felt authentically valued by MLB and commissioner Rob Manfred. He loved his job, and worked through much of his illness.

Ausmus last saw Bean ten days ago. “I was worried it would be [the final meeting],” he says. “He was in a lot of pain, very uncomfortable.”

It was a long way from the world-class athlete that Ausmus had met more than 30 years earlier.

“He always loved the game,” Ausmus says, sipping from a bottle of water, still looking out at the field. “He was that gritty, blue collar utility player who would do anything he could to help the team win.”