There for the Bats and Balls

Picture this scene and tell me if it turns you on: A cramped, low-ceilinged locker room. Discarded uniforms everywhere. A table of greasy catered food. Steam pouring from a communal shower. Team personnel running in and out. Dusty, sweaty baseball players in various stages of undress who want to do anything but talk to the timid gringa with a tape recorder.

If you’re aroused by this, you either have an extremely bizarre fetish or you are a sportswriter who got into the business for the wrong reasons. Personally, dealing with this element of my Triple-A baseball assignment was the hardest part of my summer internship.

Now, I consider myself pretty liberal. I don’t have a huge problem with nudity. But it is one thing to go skinny-dipping with your friends in the lake at midnight, and quite another to walk into a room full of 25 naked men and attempt to preserve an air of professionalism.

The Triple-A baseball clubhouse, my co-workers warned me, is one of the most tense places in all of sports. That locker room is full of guys resentful about being sent down from the majors, guys jaded about being stuck one rung from the top, and guys cocky about making the jump from Single- or Double-A. Our ballpark in particular illustrated the stark difference between major league and minor league—it was 50 years old and desperately in need of remodeling, so old that the visiting team had to dress in a trailer out behind the left-field wall.

This added up to a bunch of guys who were often looking for an outlet for their tensions. A co-worker told me how, when he covered the team, one of the outfielders would pelt him with ice cubes every time he walked into the clubhouse.

I escaped the ice shower, but couldn’t avoid the verbal deluge. Not only was I a reporter, but I was a girl reporter—the hazing was inevitable. There was the time the rightfielder asked for my phone number, or the time the manager told me I was “nicer to look at” than the regular beat writer.

And then, there was the nudity.

The first time I walked into the locker room to get a pre-game notebook item, the reaction was comical. Jaws dropped. Hands scrambled for towels. One player strolled out of the shower, saw me, and hopped back in with a yelp that would probably be unprintable if translated here.

In subsequent games, shock turned to bemusement. This occasionally happened at the expense of the players—one time, as I was interviewing an outfielder, a teammate came up behind him and ripped off his towel mid-interview. It’s hard to say who was more embarrassed, me or the 6’4 nude 19-year old.

There was the time the designated hitter called to my attention the “bat lengths” of his rookie teammates.

“Do you like boxers or briefs?” he asked loudly. “Personally, I prefer these new Under Armour boxers. They feel really good on your balls.”

I smiled wanly, trying to keep my cool.

“That’s off the record,” he added.

One time, I needed a quote from the new catcher the parent team had just gotten in a trade. I asked one of the pitchers to point him out for me, since once they removed their uniforms I had a hard time telling them apart. The pitcher pointed, and I turned just in time to lock eyes with the player in question, stark naked.

There was a moment of intense awkwardness, and then I squeaked, “I’ll give you a few minutes.”

After a moment, I waded through the sea of limbs and jockstraps and stuck out my hand.

“Hey Miguel, I wanted to talk to you,” I began.

He grinned. “Did you want to talk to me before, or after you saw me?”

In a movie, I would have a snappy comeback. In reality, I hiccupped and stammered inanely, “So how do you think you played today…?”

It got easier over the course of the summer, and I expect it will get easier the more I do it. It’s a simple matter of looking at the ceiling, the floor, and anywhere but straight ahead at the unclothed flesh in front of you.

What I haven’t yet managed, though, is to dispel the perception that this is the best part of the job. It is true that sportswriters, and even sportswriting interns, have access to players that fans can only dream of. So yes, I’ve interviewed future Hall of Famers. And yes, I’ve seen them naked. But no, it wasn’t the least bit erotic.

“Wait, you got to go in the locker room?” my friends gasped when I told them how I spent my summer. And then the conspiratorial smile: “Did you see…?”

I’m sorry if I can’t tell you in detail the length of the wood that your favorite major leaguer is swinging. Believe it or not, I wasn’t looking.

It comes down to professionalism, as square as that may sound. There remains an undercurrent of sentiment that women have no place in a room with naked men, and that it violates the privacy of the players. Former Detroit Tigers pitcher Jack Morris famously said of female reporters, “The only time I want to talk to a woman when I’m naked is if I’m on top of her or she’s on top of me.” Even if you make it past the locker room door, there’s a prevalent stereotype that women are only there as Peeping Tinas.

I’m not there for the peep show. And I’m not there to break down barriers for women. I’m just a cub reporter on the job, trying to get two quotes so I can get my story in before deadline.

And come on, if I really want to see naked men, I don’t need to go to the trouble of acquiring a press pass.

Lisa J. Kennelly ’06, a history and literature concentrator in Eliot House, is sports co-chair of The Crimson. Her familiarity with male nudity notwithstanding, she doesn’t intend to cover Primal Scream.