Until this week, no active baseball player associated with a Major League Baseball team had ever publicly come out as gay. David Denson, a prospect playing for the Helena Brewers in one of baseball’s rookie leagues, has finally ended that streak.
My colleague Billy Witz has detailed the human interest story here. But baseball is a game with a statistical bent, and I thought it worth putting Denson’s decision in that perspective.
Estimates of the proportion of American men who identify as gay or bisexual vary. One recent government survey suggested 2.