Ditz

Issue date: 12/6/07 Section: Viewpoints

Media Credit: Megan McFadden

When I signed up to spend the summer in wild, untamed Alaska, I didn't envision myself watching a slurring, drunken baseball player trying to convince an equally drunken fat girl to have sex with him in a rusty, dilapidated trailer park.

But I can't say I was surprised.

Before I go on, let's get one thing straight: I'm not writing this to disparage baseball players, football players or any other group of athletes. I am one, after all, and as an aspiring play-by-play announcer, I plan to be around them permanently. This is just an illustration, a true-life fable, of a reality that I feel girls deserve to know about.

I'm 23, and I've played organized baseball since I was six. Which means I've played with sexually aware teammates for approximately eleven years. I've overheard so many dugout and locker room sex stories, I could write a series of male-oriented hardcore romance novels, which would be silly because each story would only be about two paragraphs long, and they'd never sell because there'd be no pictures. Unless I illustrated them. But I can't draw. Which, considering the stories I've heard, is probably fortunate.

Let's go back to Drunken Baseball Guy Begging for Sex. For our purposes, we'll call him Dick. Stop snickering.

Dick was not a bad baseball player. He was in an elite Division 1 program, and he'd come to play for Fairbanks in the Alaska Baseball League, arguably the best amateur summer league in the world, to hone his skills. Instead, he was performing as if he had none. Try three hits in thirty-three at-bats, or a batting average of .091. In fact, at the time of the incident in question, he'd gone oh for his last twenty. That's a batting average of zero, if you're keeping score. Dick was, unquestionably, in a slump. And a baseball player in a slump is a singularly dangerous individual.

If any young, burgeoning sociologists want to conduct an extensive, in-depth study of group superstition and paranoia, they needn't travel to far-flung jungles or shady bazaars; the closest baseball diamond would give them everything they need. In a modern world that allegedly prides itself on scientific precision and advanced rationality, the baseball field remains an oasis of highly illogical habits.

Observe a baseball team for any extended period of time, and you'll see guys who tap their bat on the ground the same number of times before each pitch, wear their jerseys the same way each game, arrive at the ballpark at the same time each day, walk the same route from the clubhouse to the dugout before every practice and never, ever, step on the foul lines. That's just the tip of the iceberg, and they're the normal ones.

When things start going wrong, the real fun begins. Guys will change up their routine completely in an attempt to regain their karma, their rhythm, their feel. They'll set their glove in a different place. They'll use a different bat. They'll even hold official exorcism rituals. In the 2007 season, New York Yankee relief pitcher Scott Proctor had a terrible month of June; accordingly, on June 31st, he took his glove, hat, and spikes onto the field at Yankee Stadium and burned them publicly. "I did it before…when things were going bad, just to change it up," he told the New York Post, "I feel great right now." Proctor then had a stellar July. And he'd tell you that it all started with that mojo-reversing act.

There's one more superstition I should mention. Sometimes, a player tries all of the above, but the slump just gets worse. He becomes desperate. Flustered. Exasperated. Disheveled. Flummoxed. That, according to Section 110.2 of the Unwritten Code of Male Chauvinist Baseball Superstitional Lore, is when you have to bring out the big guns. Literally.

You need a Slumpbuster.

That, incidentally, is precisely where Dick found himself. Three for thirty-three. Oh for twenty. Nothing was working. So, to compensate, he was making himself exceptionally drunk.

He wasn't alone. After almost every home game (which usually ended around 10 P.M. Alaskan Time), most of the team would shower, change, and convene in the center of the Olympic Village, which was a very misleadingly-named collection of ramshackle trailers that housed a quarter of the team and their radio play-by-play announcer (me). Two or three of them would run to the local store and buy several 24-packs of Busch, Bud Light, Coors Light, or Natural Ice. And they would all sit around sipping, guzzling, shotgunning, and beer ponging cheap suds until three or four in the morning. It seemed horribly tedious, even if it was mildly entertaining to watch. Alaska is gorgeous, but its cities are numbing; it never gets fully dark in the summer, so your body never feels like going to sleep, but there's also nothing to do. The juxtaposition of beauty and boredom becomes soul-sucking. Fairbanks has one of the highest alcoholism rates in the world, and when you're there, you understand. Being in a slump probably doesn't help.

On this particular night, besides the usual tasteless fizzy beer, Dick was also helping himself to a bottle of Smirnoff. And more beer. And more Smirnoff. Swig, swallow, repeat.

Now, if you've ever been around drunk people, you know that some actually become much more charismatic and charming when they're buzzed. Filled with Liquid Courage, they lose their inhibitions and suddenly seem much more interesting, funny, and insightful.

Dick was not one of those people.

When sober, he looked like a Russian vampire. His head was big and angular, with a smile that showed crooked teeth and frighteningly prominent incisors. He could've starred in a cheesy made-for-TV Halloween movie without makeup or false teeth and nobody would've known the difference. We called him "Drago." When he was drunk, he was still all of the above but with alcohol-breath and slurred speech. You get the idea.

The customary late-night/early morning proceedings invariably became more interesting to watch when the local girls showed up. There were two stalwarts, Brittany and Tiffany, who usually made the pilgrimage after their shift at the Pizza Hut down the street. Tiffany was blonde, Brittany was brunette. They were pretty, but their faces were tinged with an air of small-town desperation and gloom. They always brought a 12-pack of Miller Lite. And they always finished it.

Their presence livened up the action, simply because watching twenty-five hammered, horny guys blatantly trying to get in their pants was funny. What made it even better was that nobody ever succeeded. To my knowledge, despite the fact that the girls themselves were always staggeringly drunk by early morning, neither Brittany nor Tiffany ever acquiesced to the drooling come-ons and leering propositions. They were the ultimate teases. For a detached observer, it was a fantastic spectator sport.

"Why," I asked them once, "do you hang out with a bunch of jerk baseball players in a trashy trailer park?" Brittany looked at me with slightly dilated sky-blue eyes and laughed emptily.

"It's Fairbanks," she said, "What else are you gonna do?"

On this particular night, however, Brittany and Tiffany were not alone. This time, they brought a friend.

I knew it was trouble when they walked through the calcified gate into the creaky compound. Their friend, who we'll call "Jane," was not slender. Really, I'm trying to be nice. But she was…well…fat. There. I said it. And believe me, compared to everything else that was said about her that night, I'm being charitable.

Remember the Slumpbuster? She was it. In baseball circles, sex with a fat girl is the ultimate tonic to turn your fortunes around. As soon as she walked in, she was a target. And everyone knew who was in line for her.

"Dick, you have to bang that bitch," one guy said.

"Dude, she is the ultimate Slumpbuster," said another. "You fuck her, you're guaranteed four hits tomorrow night."

Despite his inebriation, Dick was not initially enthused. "Uhhhh," he groaned.

"Dick, you're three for thirty-three," his equally inebriated teammates reminded him. "You need this."

Dick agreed, reluctantly. "I do need it, huh?"

"You need it, man."

Dick sighed. "Alright," he slurred, and walked over to the girls.

The next few hours saw Dick awkwardly trying to chat up Jane, who was downing Miller Lites at an astounding rate. But Jane apparently wanted nothing to do with Dick. She ignored him at every turn. The rest of the team observed and laughed.

Dick was ready to give up. "Dude," he said as he staggered back to the main group, "it's just not happening." But the boys wouldn't let him quit.

"Get back over there, Dickie," they urged. "You need this."

And so the dance continued. Everyone lounged around drinking more beer, watching Dick's continued efforts, grateful that the unfolding sordid drama gave them a temporary escape from their boredom. But I was not in the mood. The bad taste in my mouth was getting worse. Fortunately, Brent, the center fielder, had procured a BB gun and was shooting empty beer cans in a corner. Brent was Mormon, and drinking was against his religion; by default, he was usually the only other sober person in the complex. It was nice to have someone coherent to talk to. We took turns trying to knock a bottle off of a steel support. Suddenly, Jane wavered unsteadily toward us.

"Can I try?" She asked loudly.

Brent was holding the gun. He shrugged. "Sure."

Jane took the implement and stared cross-eyed down the sights. "Wait, how does it work?" She stammered, haphazardly swinging the barrel right in my face and peering at the trigger. The sudden surge of alarm, fear, and adrenaline that surged through me was almost a welcome sensation, another divergence from the monotony. Brent pushed the barrel skyward and gently confiscated the gun from Jane.

"I think it's time to put the gun away," he said.

"Sure, Brent, hand the gun to the drunk girl," I muttered. Brent giggled. Maybe he wasn't sober after all.

It was almost 4:00 a.m., and the perpetual Alaskan Summer sun was already rising above the rugged, pine-covered mountains that it barely hid behind for a couple dusky hours each night. I was tired, disgusted, and numb. I crawled into my trailer, shut the curtains, and fell asleep.

If nothing else, I was glad that Dick wasn't going to get cheap sex from a girl he had absolutely no love for.

But I was wrong.

The next day, it was all anyone wanted to talk about.

"Dickie got his slumpbuster!"

"Yep, he finally got 'er. Man, that was nasty."

Apparently, through a combination of persistence and alcoholic attrition, Dick had indeed convinced Jane to have sex with him. In a trailer with a window. While everyone else watched.

Later, Dick recounted his hazy memory of the event with his teammates.

"I don't remember a whole lot," he said. "Like, I remember fucking her, and then, I think she wanted to, like, hang out or something. She was all clingy. So I went and hid in the dugout until she left."

The boys laughed.

"Oh, Dickie, you were inside me!" One said in a mocking, high-pitched girl voice.

Everyone laughed harder.

"By the way," Mark, the infielder, said to Dick, "That condom I gave you was about six years old."

That night, Dick finally got a hit. After three more fruitless at-bats, he came up in the ninth inning and stroked a clean single to left field.

"When I got to first base," he told us on the team bus afterward, "I said to the first basemen, 'I fucked a fat chick for that hit.' He said, 'Hey, you gotta do what you gotta do.'"

There was more laughter. Dick sat in silent contemplation for a few moments, and then grinned.

"You know, you have to be a dirty motherfucker to play this game," he said. "On and off the field."

I probably shouldn't have told you this.

One, I fear that you'll read it as just another rant against athletes. It's not. I've known many who are fantastic, respectful guys and treat women with the honor they deserve. But, as this story illustrates, I've met many others who don't. That's not a knock on baseball players; it's a knock on men in general. The only difference is that an athletic environment often amplifies and exaggerates stereotypically male traits. That can be a positive (courage, hard work, commitment), or a negative (lewd, entitled views toward women).

Two, I'm not telling you anything you don't already know. Yes, Donny, I hear you say, a lot of men are jerks. Thanks. But I'm amazed by how often you girls ignore this fact. I'm shocked at how many Janes there are, and most of them aren't overweight. They just seem to be so desperate for validation and positive attention that they'll tumble for almost any guy who tells them they're beautiful.

You're more than what the cover of Cosmo says you are. You're more than "10 Ways to Please Your Man." You're more than your body, no matter how slim or fat. You know this. So start acting like it.

I've told you this story because I think that you should occasionally get to see how some men talk about you when you're not around. I've heard similar conversations among construction workers and business executives. There are some who really care about you, and others who see you only for the physical attributes you have or the weird bragging rights you'll entitle them to.

How can you tell the difference? It's hard. Men can be good at fooling you. Chances are, you won't figure it out the first time you meet him. Or the second, or the third. Especially if you're five beers and four Jell-O shots deep.

So, if you decide to fall for that guy at the party because he's cute and he says he loves you, go right ahead. I'm not here to tell you what to do. But if he never calls you, never acknowledges you again, and talks about you as if you were just a blow-up doll, don't be surprised.

And don't say I didn't warn you.

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