What do baseball players think?

The Chicago Tribune and other Tribune papers conducted a survey of baseball players on a variety of baseball-related questions. The response rate was quite high — 475 of 750 players (63%) responded. Most of the results are thoroughly unsurprising (Wrigley Field is the best ballpark; Barry Bonds is the best baseball player). However, I was pleasantly surprised by two findings:

An overwhelming majority of respondents—399—believe major-league players have a responsibility to be role models. “As a player you get watched by a lot of kids, a lot of people,” Houston center fielder Carlos Beltran said. “And when you’re a good player, you have a lot of responsibility, you’ve got to do things right, in God’s eyes and everybody’s eyes, because people are looking at you, kids are looking at you.”…. Players were almost as strongly united in their feelings about having a gay teammate, with better than 74 percent saying it would not be a problem. “I had one, Billy Bean, and I didn’t have a problem with it,” Texas pitcher Doug Brocail said. “Not at all. I’ve probably had one already,” said Willie Harris of the White Sox. (emphasis added)

The tolerance for a gay teammate was particularly surprising, because the common media perception is that there is massive amounts of homophobia in professional sports — click here for an Associated Press story from last week, and here and here for other examples. This survey suggests, at a minimum, that this is not true of baseball. [What if the ballplayers were lying to appear politically correct?–ed. Well, you automatically run into that problem with public opinion surveys about touchy social issues, and that’s an important caveat. That said, the survey also showed that only a third of the respondents said that steroid abuse was a problem in baseball. If image-conscious ballplayers were really trying to give answers that please media folks, that response should have been inflated as well.] UPDATE: While I’m posting about baseball, Red Sox fans everywhere will have a good, rueful laugh at this Seth Stevenson rant about Roger Clemens over at Slate.