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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
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If coke-fueled orgies are going down, odds are they're happening at Spring Training. It's the perfect setting.
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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
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A Marlins pitcher warms up — the crowd. (click to enlarge)
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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?
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Duffy's, hangout for players and fans. (click to enlarge)
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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."
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