Glenn Burke and baseball.

I've mentioned Glenn Burke once before, in 2010.

"Out at Home."

On Tuesday, I didn't watch the All Star Game, primarily because I don't have time to devote to meaningless fluffery.

However, apparently there was a civil rights (and human decency) component to the proceedings, in that Glenn Burke was recognized ... albeit not prior to the game or for the television audience, which of course is another example of Bud Selig's intrinsic gutlessness as the worst sports commissioner in recorded history.

But I digress. Glenn Burke should be remembered, and as a society, we need to get past the senseless bigotry that ruins lives.

Posthumous Recognition: M.L.B. to Recognize Glenn Burke as Baseball’s Gay Pioneer, by John Branch (New York Times)

EMERYVILLE, Calif. — Glenn Burke was 27 when he walked out on Major League Baseball, his promising career as an outfielder undone mostly by the burden of being a semicloseted gay man. It was 1980, and it was more important, Burke later explained, to be himself than to be a professional baseball player.

“It’s harder to be gay in sports than anywhere else, except maybe president,” Burke said in 1982, when he came out publicly in an Inside Sports magazine article. “Baseball is probably the hardest sport of all.”