Todd Frazier, then with the Reds, was on his way to winning Major League Baseball’s home run derby in Cincinnati four years ago when Scott MacArthur made the seminal decision to come out as gay to his parents.

It was an otherwise typical Monday night at the MacArthur home in Oakville: dinner, a couple of drinks. The mid-season derby was airing on mute in the family room when MacArthur, then the Blue Jays reporter at TSN Radio, ripped off the Band-Aid.

“I remember thinking, ‘The moment you tell them, there’s no going back. There’s no more pretending’ … It doesn’t mean everybody else knows yet, but you now can’t have this facade because you’ve told the two most important people in your life,” recalled MacArthur, now host of Blue Jays Talk on Sportsnet 590 The FAN and filling in on other shows through the summer.

The words didn’t come easily, he said. He started to cry before he got them out: “I remember clearly saying, ‘I’m gay and I always have been.’”

It was only the second time that MacArthur, then 36, had spoken those words to another person, outside of clandestine hook-ups. The first one he told was a psychotherapist, who he began working with in early 2015 when he felt burned out at work and knew he was in trouble.

Telling dad Jamie and mom Terry wasn’t nerve-wracking, he said. It was necessary.

“At that point it was either I do this or I die — quite literally. There’s no point in living like this any longer. I’d gotten to that point.”

That was only the beginning of a lengthy journey to share his truth, which he went public with on July 20 in a video posted on YouTube.

“I am sitting before you today as a gay man who is a proud gay man,” MacArthur said.

Such a proclamation is rare in the world of professional sports. In MLB, former Los Angeles Dodgers Billy Bean and Glenn Burke (who died in 1995 from AIDS complications) are the only players to come out publicly, both in retirement. Since then, athletes in other pro sports have broken their silence, including basketball’s Jason Collins, football’s Michael Sam and soccer’s Collin Martin, who still plays for Major League Soccer’s Minnesota United.

MacArthur’s decision had nothing to do with the fact that so few before him have come out in sports broadcasting, the arena he’d dreamed of working in since he was 8. It was about shedding a burden he said he’d carried since around age 12.

For a while, MacArthur said, he assumed attraction to other men was a phase. He figured he would eventually marry a woman, have kids, a dog, a house — “everything but the white picket fence, unless it came back in style.”

Getting married to a woman — which he did for a time in Ottawa, later divorced — was one of four stages he’d divided his life into as a closeted, adult male. There were also periods of numbing with drugs (mostly marijuana), born-again Christianity and burying himself in work. The common thread was a struggle with mental health, as MacArthur battled depression and suicidal thoughts.

It was in the late 1990s as a journalism student at Ottawa’s Carleton University that MacArthur, then about 20, first became aware of his mental health problems. Some days were better than others. He spent more than a decade getting his post-secondary education and working in the nation’s capital, but he was in Toronto in 2015 — in his third season of covering all 162 Jays games for TSN Radio — when he suffered what he called a “total nuclear meltdown.”

As the Jays soared, reaching the playoffs in back-to-back seasons for the first time in more than 20 years, MacArthur spiralled. Today, he feels elation when he rewatches moments such as Jose Bautista’s iconic bat flip homer against the Texas Rangers, but he didn’t feel that way at the time.

After the Jays were eliminated by the Kansas City Royals in the 2015 AL Championship Series in October, MacArthur returned to Toronto so wound up, so filled with rage, so broken, that he decided to put his feeling down on paper. About 21/2 hours and 41/2 pages later, he sent those words to his parents — still the only people he’d told he was gay — in Oakville.

“My dad called me back 10 minutes later in tears, asking me if him and mom had to come into the city and my condo,” MacArthur said. “Was I going to kill myself that night?”

That reaction was a wake-up call for MacArthur, who first connected with the LGBTQ community between the 2015 and 2016 baseball seasons. He came out to his brother Drew and sister-in-law Lauren in July 2016, a year in which he cut back on work travel.

By late 2017, after moving to afternoons on TSN, MacArthur was ready to find allies in the office and at the ballpark, so he confided in close friends and industry veterans Shawn Lavigne, a producer at the radio station, and John Lott, a fellow Jays writer. Neither blinked an eye when MacArthur came out. Still, they shared some concern about his decision to come out publicly, which MacArthur made after a conversation with a friend around his 40th birthday during Pride week in Toronto.

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“I was incredibly proud of him, I was incredibly excited, but I was scared,” Lavigne said. “I was scared of what the reaction could be. I was in big brother mode. I just wanted to make sure he was doing the right thing.”

Lott remembers feeling “so damned proud of him, and a little apprehensive, too.”

“When I watched his video, I’ve got to admit, tears were rolling down my cheeks,” he said in an email. “I was just so happy to see him shed that burden.”

They both said they have seen a change in MacArthur, personally and professional, since the YouTube video was shared about seven weeks ago.

“He is just so much happier,” Lott said. “His steps are lighter. It lifts my spirits just to think about it.”

During the Jays’ last two playoff runs, Lavigne remembers having marathon, emotional conversations with MacArthur two to three times a week. That’s not the case anymore.

“I’ve talked to him many times since and he sounds different on the phone. You can tell he’s happier,” Lavigne said. “I always knew he was going to get to this point, and now that he is at this point, I couldn’t be happier for him.”

MacArthur says the response has been overwhelmingly positive, though he was careful to get to a place where he wasn’t counting on validation — “a dangerous game” — before he opened up.

“I only did it when I was emotionally ready to do it,” MacArthur said. “It was the last step to take.”

It may also double as a first step in making the local sports and media markets more inclusive and accepting.

“Queer people who think about a career in sports media in this market can look at Scott and say, ‘Hey, he came out and everybody cheered,’” Lott said. “He’s made that path easier for those who follow. That’s a terrific legacy.”

Talking legacy may be a little much for MacArthur, considered one of the best on the local scene, but he is happily learning more about the LGBTQ community and his place within it. He is happily injecting more of himself into his broadcasts, free of an exhausting life of micromanaging half-truths.

Happiness remains something of a foreign concept for a man who said he has a “keen radar for misery because I waded in it forever.” But he’s getting there.

“(Misery) is such a waste. We’ve all got one shot at this life. Be who you are.”