Hitting Slump
Today's baseball players are sexually repressed; groupies mourn.
by Ada Calhoun
April 09, 2007
Women have always loved baseball, and baseball players. The 1927 song "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" is a young woman's plea to her boyfriend; the rarely sung opening lines are:
Nelly Kelly loved baseball games,
Knew the players, knew all their names,
You could see her there ev'ry day,
Shout "Hurray" when they'd play.
Baseball stadiums are cathedralesque, romantic; against the green grass, the players look like smartly dressed statues of David. The game rolls out at a leisurely pace, with no clock, no frenetic running back and forth. Conversation is easy; beer is served. It's an easy game to fall in love with. And if you like men at all, you probably find your mind wandering at some point in the innings as your favorite pitcher goes through his rotations.
My affair with baseball started early. When the New York Mets won the World Series in 1986, I was ten, and so consumed with Mets Fever, I went as mustachioed first-baseman Keith Hernandez for Halloween. My favorite player was Lenny Dykstra, the scrappy, spitting, scratching little outfielder with a lisp. He looked like he was covered with dirt even when freshly showered, appeared to be up to no good even when he was just standing there, and seemed so dumb I doubted his ability to feed himself. I made plans to date him, or someone like him, as soon as possible. And I wasn't alone. That year, a woman appeared in the stands wearing a wedding dress, bearing a sign that read, "Marry Me, Lenny."
In the late '80s, I was too young to follow "Page Six," so I didn't know what the hairy-chested players I adored were up to during their downtime: racking up a reputation as one of the most debauched teams in history. If only I'd been eight or so years older, I might have cornered Lenny or his brethren at a midtown bar and shown my appreciation for their amazing season. Fortunately, the tabloids (and court system) maintain a record of those years for posterity: orgies; binge drinking; cocaine; jerking off in front of groupies in the bullpen. They were — and I never use this phrase, but there's no other word for it — the ultimate pussy hounds.
Memoirist Barbara Grizutti Harrison wrote of her love of baseball players: "Never mind that real-life baseball players are tobacco-chewing, spitting, crotch-scratching, womanizing swine." The women who have historically bedded such louts — irresistibly hot-bodied, All-American louts — are referred to as baseball groupies, or Annies. The minor-league version is terrifically celebrated in the Susan Sarandon-Kevin Costner-Tim Robbins film Bull Durham, in which local English teacher Annie Savoy (so named as a nod to the term Baseball Annie) runs a pitching clinic out of her bedroom. The major-league version is anthropologically assessed in the 1975 campfest Sportin' Ladies (you gotta love Amazon Marketplace). In the book, Herb Michelson describes Baseball Annies this way: "The Bimbos. The girls who do, or would like to do. Women who fancy jocks but are otherwise unprogrammed. Annies, Shirleys, Groupies, Starfuckers;' that's what the men call them . . . A Bimbo doesn't
kid herself forever because she knows the ground rules; life will probably screw her just like all those other guys did. But she knows, too, that screwing can work two ways."
Where are the "Bimbos," or even the Annie Savoys, of today? They're sure not on the screen or in the papers. Every once in a while, a player will, say, knock up a Hooters waitress (Chipper Jones), but that's A-ball next to the sheer lecherousness of beloved '80s heroes like Ron Darling and Keith Hernandez. And any time a player gets caught screwing around at all these days, the media and the public act like he's smothering puppies.
Last year, the New York Post went all-out on the mild extramarital dating life of stocky Mets catcher Paul Lo Duca. Lo Duca, a man so relentlessly decent he actually scratches his dead mother's initials in the dirt every time he goes up to bat, hooked up with a nineteen year old at a bar. He wasn't yet divorced from his Playboy-model wife, although they were separated. Reporters knocked on the wife's door. The team came out and made a statement. Lo Duca was mortified. That'll teach him to . . . date?
So why is it that you never hear anymore about whole teams in bed with a local college-cheerleading squad? Are players really so tame these days? Or are the papers just too busy digging through Lindsay Lohan's trash looking for pregnancy tests to find the genuinely hot stories involving the most attractive men in the country and an army of willing young women?
You deserve to know. So, doing my best impression of Brenda Starr, I got on a plane to Florida early this March to see what I could find out. If coke-fueled orgies are going down, odds are good that they're happening at Spring Training. It's the perfect setting: sports bars are everywhere; the beach is ten minutes away; the games don't count.
Held each March in Arizona (the Cactus League) and Florida (the Grapefruit League), Spring Training is heaven for fans. The stadiums are far more intimate than the regular parks; you can almost reach out and touch the players. In fact, if you sit in the right seats, you can quite easily reach out and touch the players, especially the pitchers (traditionally, Annies' favorite players), who warm up by the foul line in left field. If fans aren't leaning over the dugout, they're out there, seated just past third base.
While most Spring Training attendees are white-haired retirees or sports fanatics clutching a stack of memorabilia and a Sharpie, there are plenty of women who show up with something else in mind. "In Florida, you have half the teams in major-league baseball, as well as lots of upper-echelon minor-league players hoping to make the teams," says sportswriter Jean Hastings Ardell, author of Breaking Into Baseball: Women and the National Pastime. "So you have a heck of a lot of ballplayers to choose from. It's also springtime. You go on any college campus — people are silly in the spring."
But not so silly that they don't study up. "Some of these girls do their research," said one college pitcher I met at Laguardia Airport. (He'd been drafted by the Tigers.) "In some towns, you see the same girls every year, and every year they know who's got the best shot of making it and that's who they go for."
When I landed on the Treasure Coast, as the part of east Florida where the Mets train is known, early this March, it was seventy degrees and sunny. The air was slightly sticky and salty. Cadillac Escalades peppered I-95, a major drug corridor. The palm trees were swaying. Every woman at the international airport was bursting out of her clothes. Every local radio station in the rental car seemed to be playing vapid summer songs by John Cougar Mellencamp. After dusk, there aren't many parking lots in Port St. Lucie without at least one couple making out against a row of shopping carts.
At Tradition Field, where the Mets play their Spring Training home games, there are many food-and-booze options, as well as a radar-gun booth, set up so men can humiliate themselves in front of their dates by huffing and puffing and throwing thirty-four miles an hour. In the shade of the stadium, I scanned the snack areas. "Are there any groupies here?" I asked a hot-dog vendor who looked rather like a porn director. He scanned me up and down. "The Island Girl Tiki Bar out in Left Field," he said. "They'll probably hire you." I asked if the groupies worked there. "Work, drink — same thing," he replied. He also told me to check out Duffy's sports bar after the game if I wanted to meet players. I told him I just wanted to meet girls who wanted to meet players. He didn't seem to believe me.
The women who work at the Island Girl Tiki Bar, a few thatched huts shielding patronsfrom the spring sun, terrified me. They weren't beautiful, but they were all hot, with long, blown-out, slightly frayed hair and penciled-in eyebrows. Like strippers, but as they act backstage, without the full makeup and fake enthusiasm. They wanted nothing to do with me. "The players? They'll probably go to South Beach tonight," one said when I tried to ask her about the nightlife in Port St. Lucie. Another barmaid, who was wearing a Hawaiian shirt tied under her boobs that kept falling open as she reached for plastic bottles full of Malibu rum, said — in a distinctly New York accent — that she didn't speak English. All of the bartenders seemed frustrated. They seemed — and I know this is a really cheap thing to say about someone who's rude to you, but I intuited this — like they weren't getting any.
Non-barmaidspring-training groupies, some local and some on vacation from the north, show up to games and bars in tight jeans or jean skirts and cute, tight T-shirts. It's mostly about the hair, long and pretty. Lips are glossy. Mascara is well applied. Tasteful jewelry. College chic. They travel in packs of three, four or five. Some are older, in the model of Susan Sarandon's Annie, but most look and act like Annie's happily slutty disciple, Millie.
After the game, slightly buzzed, they clickety-clack or flippety-flop over to the gate by the players' parking lot, where they peer through holes in the black tarp covering the chain-link fence. Later that night, they make their way to the Duffy's near Tradition Field, or the Applebee's across the street from the Highway One Holiday Inn (where the players stay). No one's looking for a relationship. They're all just looking for something to get them through the night — as the classic-rock soundtrack of the local radio constantly reminds us.
But is this dutiful primping and stalkinggetting the women anywhere with the big leaguers? Not so much. After an afternoon game, handsome future Hall of Famer Carlos Beltran pulled out of the parking lot and his car was swarmed. The woman in the driver's seat, whom several fans said was his wife, hit the gas and cut off several cars, some kids rushing up with balls, and ladies in shorts and Mets jerseys with a hungry look in their eyes. David Wright's waitress at the Outback Steakhouse reportedly fawned over him, but apparently he was just there for the meat.
Appalled by the lack of attention the hot girls standing next to me at the parking gate were getting from even the lowliest team members, I went to see a team with a lower profile: the Florida Marlins.
Roger Dean Stadium, in Jupiter, Florida (about thirty minutes south of Port St. Lucie), is shared by the 2006 World Champion Cardinals and the pitiful young Marlins. At the Sunday game, things looked promising: an olive-skinned woman in a turquoise cowgirl hat had a look of fierce determination on her face as she rounded the corner from the food court and walked briskly to the area by left field where the pitchers were warming up. She set her sights on and got a pitcher's attention. Her face lit up in a glow of flirtation. She smiled, she played with her hair, she looked down and then quickly up. It was as if she'd ripped a page out of an old Cosmo and memorized it. The player she was trying to ensnare smiled, shrugged, went back to pitching. She walked away, looking desperate but unvanquished. You could almost see the thought bubble over her head: "You will be mine, terrible Marlins relief pitcher. Oh, yes, you will be mine."
In the same part of the stadium stood two mellower and very attractive young blonde women. The sky was overcast and there was a little chill in the air; they were shivering a little in short-shorts and hand-made Marlins A-shirts. They also had matching Marlins purses and hats and matching radiant smiles.
Asked if they'd dated players, Lauren and Sarah, both sixteen, said, "Not yet, but we plan to!" Marlins players, most of whom are single and in their early twenties, refer to these two omnipresent blondes as "the twins," but, according to the girls, won't have much to do with them until they're legal. The women have their own countdown going, and a MySpace page through which to express their enthusiasm for the team.
"We come to games as often as possible and try to meet the players," said Lauren. "They're really nice." Both prefer pitchers.
"I always pick really bad players to like," said Lauren. "So they're always getting sent down to the minors and I have to find someone new." Her current favorite: Logan Kensing, a pitcher with a 4.54 ERA. Why? Because "he's really strange. Like today, he had his pants rolled all the way up and no one else did." Sarah's crush is Scott Olsen — a left-handed pitcher who that day would get hit hard. The Marlins lost 12-3.
Both women just like coming to the games and flirting. "We make shirts for all the players," said Lauren of their hand-made booster gear. "We like to spread the love around."
After that game, two young female fans wearing Cardinals red could be seen trolling the stadium with the same feverish bent as the turquoise-hat woman. They looked like sorority sisters a few years out of college — former track runners, maybe. Plain, but hot from afar, thanks to tight T-shirts. Having failed to find any players in the course of their recon mission, the pair adjourned to a nearby Mexican restaurant and bar, where they joined anotherfriend at an outside table and whispered frantically to each other about their next move.
Asked if they'd met any Cardinals, one girl who had apparently flattened her hair one too many times said, proudly, "Yeah, we only played beer pong with two of them last night right here in this very bar." One of her friends scrolled through her phone and willed the conversation over. The other laughed nervously. Their trip to Florida from their home in St. Louis seemed to have an air of desperation about it. "We got wasted," the braggart said. "I can't even remember the players' names." Her friend looked at her sternly, and they settled in for a night of waiting to see if the players would come back to roost.
Never at a loss for players: the Applebee's on Highway One in Port St. Lucie. Behind the bar most afternoons is Kimberly, a New York-y looking brunette who is sexy in a weary way, is a die-hard Yankees fan. She watches the games behind the bar or tapes them at home. "I wish I could see every game in person," she said while mixing fruity drinks.
"You
like Derek Jeter's tight pants!" said a guy drinking at the bar, when Kimberly tried to explain what she loved about baseball. "It's more than that," she says, seeming hurt. "I try to talk about baseball with the players, but they never want to." After bedding "one — okay, more than one" ballplayer, she says she's disillusioned about them romantically. And not because they're too wild. If anything, they're too juvenile, too tame, for these women who love and want them. Case in point: one night, a couple of minor-league players took the bar camera into the bathroom and took penis pictures with which to titillate the female bartenders. It didn't work. "It was itty-bitty," says one woman who saw the photos. "What were they thinking?"
"The players meet girls hanging out at the bar," says Maurice, a waiter at the Applebee's,"but it's all very high school. Nothing ever seems to go very far. It's all, 'You can have a drink with me and frolic around in the pool, but that's as far as it goes.''
Could it be that in the past twenty years, players have stopped behaving like the depraved horndogs they have been throughout history? According to "On the D.L.," the brilliantly named blog of baseball-related blind items that's been trading in unverifiable rumors since 2005, players are still screwing around plenty. One example:
Which National Leaguer's seemingly harmless hookup with a random barmaid resulted in an unbelievable amount of drama including his relocation to a new city, his wife's urgent need for a trip to the gynecologist, and the arrest of a cameraman?
Phew. STDs and infidelity. That's more like it. But the more I read, the more I started to notice that these players — whose penis size, sexual technique and overall uncouth manner are typically mocked in the posts — aren't exactly studs. They seem a bit repressed, and the more stupidly they act, the more On the D.L.'s pseudonymous lead blogger, Trixie Bells, seems to rejoice.
To wit:
Which big league backup (and all-around devoted family man) caught himself a couple of lovelies in a hotel bar one night, and invited them to his "party room" to watch a movie? Needless to say, his idea of a movie and their idea of a movie were very different. As the porn started rolling HE started masturbating, and graciously encouraged the girls to do the same... but when they tried to touch him, he freaked out. Guess if you don't touch, it's not cheating!
Reading about the players' ill-fated, neurotic sexploits, I started to feel sorry for them. Every story depicts them as desperately trying to get just a little action without being caught or sued. What is clear is that there has never been a worse time to be a rich, horny, hot young baseball player. You go out to the bar, have a few drinks with some college girls, and you don't know if you're going to wind up in someone's camera phone and all over the internet the next morning — and not in a "Look at this stallion!" way. There's no longer any sense that players are supposed to go wild and that groupies are supposed to go wild right along with them. When did it become embarrassing for our baseball players, the very emblem of American masculinity, to be sexually voracious?
"Too much is at stake now,"says Bill Liederman, who watched groupies and players interact for twenty years behind the bar at Mickey Mantle's Bar & Grill, which he bought in 1987 and sold last year (and about which he wrote a book, Mickey Mantle's: Behind the Scenes in America's Most Famous Sports Bar). These days, "the big leaguers don't go out as much." Or if they do, they seek out strippers, who are less likely to rush home and blog about it.
Which suggests that the only players holding down the slutty fort are the minor leaguers, who are younger, usually unmarried and too obscure to merit much bandwidth. Sharing a plate of salsa and chips at Duffy's, the sports bar in an entertainment complex near Tradition Field at which the waitresses wear cute green baseball-style uniforms, three minor-league players, each about twenty years old, said they'd be happy to give me the lowdown on their sex lives as long as I didn't use names and didn't have anything to do with the table of sportswriters by the window, to whom they've been told to say "no comment" on all personal matters.
The players say women either love them or hate them. I said I thought it was mostly love; on what grounds would anyone hate them? "Our reputation. It's love 'em and leave 'em," said one player, a blonde with squinty eyes and an easy manner, total Southern-style hot bully. He seemed proud of this reputation.
"Lust 'em and leave 'em!" corrected his friend, a less suave, dark-haired pitcher with a toothy smile, who is married and blatantly jealous of his compatriots. A third player, an outfielder with good skin and a quiet confidence, nodded in agreement. "Basically," said the catcher, "the goal is to have as much fun as possible with girls you never see again." He smiled like he knew exactly how cute he was. This, I thought, is a man who does not have trouble sleeping at night.
"We're living the dream," said the outfielder. "We get to play a game every day and earn money for it." The pitcher added, "And you can go out at night and get hammered and play great the next day even with your brain switched off. It's like living the college life without going to college. If you're single, there's no downside."
The catcher said he's slept with "two or three" women so far this Spring Training. I say I would have thought more like fifty. He looked flattered but demurred. "Oh, I don't think I've slept with fifty women total,"
he said. He and his friends looked at each other and considered this number, awkwardly. "Well, maybe fifty." He puffed back up a little. "Yeah, somewhere in there."
Maybe it's a sign not so much of repression but of the influence of feminism that minor-league players think fifty is a high number, that they should appreciate teenage fans from a distance. No one seems all that bothered by the decline of hedonism. All the MySpace girls who identify themselves as things like "Mets Princess" and "Mets Grrl" say they work hard to avoid the stigma of the groupie. "I know a lot of female Mets fans who are really big fans and love the team for more than just it's cute players," says "MetsGal," "but there are some females who are only interested in meeting and dating the players. If they're successful then good for them! But I definitely have more respect for the girls who have a passion for baseball, like I do."
Still, I can't help but feel that there is not nearly as much sex as there should or could be. Babe Ruth, so the old joke goes, hit all those homeruns on a diet of hot dogs and beer. On a punishing schedule of all-nighters and blow snorted off of Catholic schoolgirls, the '86 Mets won the World Series. The philandering Atlanta Brave Chipper Jones is a famous Met killer. The Cardinals beat the Mets in the 2006 post-season, and I'm starting to suspect why: beer pong. So in the interest of going all the way this year, I'd like to encourage the Mets to get back to their roots and whore around this year. I know it's nerve-wracking and tiring, but take one for the team.
©2007 Ada Calhoun and Nerve.com