Chavez Eloy G Mission Chapel

A room where players at the peak of their professional powers brace and bond and scheme and shower. Entering this room can be intimidating for an outsider, especially if your mission is to stand in the center, with all eyes fixed upon you, and say to these men the words that were once unthinkable -- or at least unspeakable -- in these confines."I'm gay," Billy Bean says in the midst of a more complete sentence. But it's those two words that cause those who didn't know his story to suddenly sit more upright and listen more intently.All these years, all this societal progress, all this personal redemption and progression, and the 53-year-old Bean is still making waves with those words. In his playing days, those words were the secret he could not share with his family, friends and teammates. Those words, that truth, put him on the path to a double life he could not manage, to a career he could not continue, to a period of internal agony and, eventually, to the baseball wilderness.Yet on this day, in this moment in the Arizona Diamondbacks clubhouse, he can say them with the confidence that he is admired, supported and encouraged by the leader of this group.That's D-backs manager Torey Lovullo over there, by the clubhouse entrance, and he's known and loved Bean for more than 30 years. There was a time when their friendship was fractured, when Bean was so staunch in his secret, so untrusting and misunderstanding of the bonds he had built, that he willingly walked away from those who thought they knew him best. Lovullo and Bean didn't talk for many years, and that's the dispiriting element of this story, which we'll delve into in just a moment.The inspiring part, though, is right here, right now, with the 2017 National League Manager of the Year welcoming vice president and special assistant to the Commissioner into his clubhouse for a Spring Training speech about the sport's societal impact and public responsibility. Bean is in the position he is in because open-minded people like Lovullo rightly recognize the importance of the message he can ...