Baseball player BILLY BEAN was born on this date (d: 8/6/2024). Born William Daro Bean, the former Major League Baseball player made news in 1999 when he made his sexuality public. Bean was an outfielder, and left-handed hitter, with 487 at bats with a .226 batting average in a career that lasted from 1987 through 1995: Detroit Tigers 1987-1989, Los Angeles Dodgers 1989, San Diego Padres 1993-1995. He also played for the Kintetsu Buffaloes in Japan in 1992. Bean tied a major league record with four hits in his first major league game.
In 1989, Bean married Anna Maria Amato, a student at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandise in Los Angeles, whom Bean had been dating since 1985. The Bean-Amato wedding was held on the Bluff at Loyola and attended by 300 guests, including 20 major league baseball players.
Two years into his marriage, while playing for the Los Angeles Dodgers’ AAA affiliate in Albuquerque, Bean met a man at a cowboy-themed gay bar. In January 1993, while Bean and his wife were visiting her parents in the Washington, DC suburbs, Bean met his future partner Sam Madani, an Iranian immigrant, in the gym showers at a Maryland health club. One week later, Amato and Bean separated and began divorce proceedings.
Bean and his new partner Madani, who was raised in Austria and France, and spoke six languages, moved into a multi-level condo with ocean views in a Del Mar, California, gated community.
Bean gave Madani a private tour of the Padres locker room at Jack Murphy Stadium, showing him the behind-the-scenes world of an MLB player. They kept their relationship and living arrangement secret from Bean’s MLB teammates. When Bean’s Padres teammates, Brad Ausmus and Trevor Hoffman, stopped by unannounced to Bean and Madani’s condo, Madani had to hide in the car for approximately three hours for fear that they would be identified as a gay couple. In 1994, Bean hosted a Super Bowl party for friends and family members and introduced Madani as “just a buddy”.
In April 1995, Madani, who less than two months earlier had been diagnosed HIV-positive, collapsed at their home. When Bean returned home after playing in an exhibition game against the Anaheim Angels, he discovered his partner unconscious. The MLB outfielder rushed Madani to the closest hospital, but changed course after recalling that he had recently appeared at the local hospital as a member of the Padres. Fearing that he would be outed, Bean drove an extra 30 minutes to a different hospital in a different direction. The next morning, Madani died of a cardiac arrest from AIDS-related complications. Bean had a baseball game at one o’clock that afternoon. Their relationship was guardedly private, and Bean did not attend Madani’s public funeral.
After acknowledging that he was Gay, Bean went on to write a book, Going the Other Way: Lessons from a life in and out of Major League Baseball. Bean was only the second former major league player to reveal his homosexuality; the late Los Angeles Dodger and Oakland Athletic Glenn Burke is the only other ex-player to have acknowledged his homosexuality. Bean lived in Miami, Florida and sold real estate. He appeared in a 2009 episode of Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List, showing Griffin several homes.
He later became the league’s senior vice president for diversity, equity and inclusion.
In 2023 Bean was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. He died at his home in New York City on August 6, 2024, at the age of 60. At the time of his death, Bean was married to Greg Baker, a doctor, a Manchester, New Hampshire native, and Boston Red Sox fan.