Bryan Ruby Becomes Only Active Pro Baseball Player to Come Out

Bryan Ruby, a professional baseball player for the Salem-Keizer Volcanoes and also a country musician, made history in a groundbreaking interview with USA TODAY Sports, coming out as gay and becoming the only active pro baseball player ever to do so.

“I kept thinking about the little 14-year-old me who was scared because I’m a baseball player who loved country music,” Ruby recalls. “Those are worlds where people like me are told they can’t belong.”

The Volcanoes are a minor league team based in Keizer, OR, and Ruby acknowledged he’s not necessarily the biggest name, or on a major league team, but that he wanted to come out to help make it easier for other professional athletes in the future.

“I want to help create a world where future generations of baseball players don’t have to sacrifice authenticity or who they really are to play the game they love,” he says.

Ruby said that being closeted for the last decade was a struggle and that he used to hate himself and how he felt, asking himself why he felt the way he did. He came out to his mother when he was 21, to which she said she was “shocked” and that he “did a really good job of hiding it.”

“The male sports world can be very homophobic with degrading banter,” she says. “I wanted to protect him from all of that.”

His father had a more positive reaction and helped his mother to come to terms with his sexuality.

“When your son sits there and bares his soul, you just want him to be happy,” his father, Jon Ruby, says.

Echoing his teenage sentiment, Bryan says that he worried his career in baseball would be impossible if he was out publicly, and that people around him told him to be cautious in who he disclosed his sexuality to.

It’s been a major year for active, major male athletes coming out for the year time: NFL player Carl Nassib of the Las Vegas Raiders came out this past June, and NHL player Luke Prokop of the Nashville Predators came out in July.

Photo courtesy of Bryan Ruby’s Instagram