Billy Bean

Dale Scott’s career as a professional baseball umpire spanned nearly forty years, including thirty-three in the Major Leagues, from 1985 to 2017. He worked exactly a thousand games behind the plate, calling balls and strikes at the pinnacle of his profession, interacting with dozens of other top-flight umpires, colorful managers, and hundreds of players. Scott has enough stories about his career on the field to fill a dozen books, but what makes Scott’s book truly different is his unique perspective as the only umpire in the history of professional baseball to come out as gay during his career, after decades of maintaining a public facade of straightness. He navigated this obstacle course at a time when his MLB career was just taking off-and when North America was consumed by the AIDS epidemic. Scott’s story isn’t only about leading a double life, then opening himself up to the world and discovering a new generosity of spirit. It’s also a baseball story, filled with insights and memorable anecdotes that come so naturally from someone who spent decades among the world’s greatest baseball players, managers, and games. Scott’s story is fascinating both for his umpiring career and for his being a pioneer for LGBTQ people within baseball and across sports.

Dale Scott’s career as a professional baseball umpire spanned nearly forty years, including thirty-three in the Major Leagues, from 1985 to 2017. He worked exactly a thousand games behind the plate, calling balls and strikes at the pinnacle of his profession, interacting with dozens of other top-flight umpires, colorful managers, and hundreds of players. Scott has enough stories about his career on the field to fill a dozen books, but what makes Scott’s book truly different is his unique perspective as the only umpire in the history of professional baseball to come out as gay during his career, after decades of maintaining a public facade of straightness. He navigated this obstacle course at a time when his MLB career was just taking off-and when North America was consumed by the AIDS epidemic. Scott’s story isn’t only about leading a double life, then opening himself up to the world and discovering a new generosity of spirit. It’s also a baseball story, filled with insights and memorable anecdotes that come so naturally from someone who spent decades among the world’s greatest baseball players, managers, and games. Scott’s story is fascinating both for his umpiring career and for his being a pioneer for LGBTQ people within baseball and across sports.

More than ten years after its original publication, Going the Other Way remains deeply moving, and more timely than ever. By virtue of a relentless work ethic, exceptional multi-sport talent, and a quick left-handed swing, Billy Bean made it to the majors, where he played from 1987 to 1995—an outfielder for the Detroit Tigers, Los Angeles Dodgers, and San Diego Padres. But as a gay man in the brutally anti-gay world of baseball, closeted to teammates and family, Bean found himself unable to reconcile two worlds that he felt to be mutually exclusive. At the young age of 31, in the prime of his career, even as he solidified his role as a major-league utility player, Bean walked away from the game that was both his calling and his livelihood. At once heartbreaking and farcical, ruminative and uncensored, this unprecedented memoir points the way toward a more perfect game, one in which all players can pursue their athletic dreams free of prejudice and discrimination.