Baseball Annies have long been a presence in the shadows of organized baseball. For much of baseball history, however, the consensus among sportswriters, players, and the front office was that one did not publicize this aspect of the game's culture. After all, these escapades took place away from the diamond, far from the daily stories unfolding on the field of play. Then along came Jim Bouton, pitcher and aspiring writer, who blew the lid off the subject. As Bouton recounts in his tell-all memoir of 1970, Ball Four, a questionnaire circulated by the Seattle Pilots' publicity department among the club's players asked, What's the most difficult thing about playing major-league baseball? And one player replied, Explaining to your wife why she needs a penicillin shot for your kidney infection. The quip refers to the sexually transmitted diseases, from gonorrhea and syphilis to herpes simplex, that pass between Baseball Annies and ballplayers; it also reveals the cavalier attitude of many womanizing ballplayers. (Not so funny was the threat of AIDS, which emerged a few years later.) Baseball Annies affect the lives of ballplayers in other ways too. Because such women are more likely to tolerate all sorts of poor treatment by the heroes they pursue, they blur the usual boundaries and protocols of behavior between a ballplayer and other women in his life. The level of complaints for statutory rape and date rape that are filed against athletes is higher than that of the general population. According to Phyllis Goldfarb, a professor of law, domestic violence is the leading cause of arrest among professional athletes. Goldfarb believes that the culture of sports sends the message that women exist primarily as rewards for athletic achievement. Consequently, a celebrity athlete may simply be taught by the culture that he is superior to his wife, that she can ask nothing of him that he doesn't want to give, that if she persists in doing so, she deserves mistreatment, and moreover, is expendable, as there are countless women out there for him. (1) We can argue that the effects of these behaviors, while unfortunate, are usually limited to the participants and their families. America, we like to say, is a free country and if grown men and women choose to behave so, that is a personal choice. (We see this attitude in the film Bull Durham, through Annie Savoy's counsel to the promiscuous Millie when the latter tries to apologize for arriving late for the ballgame: You were not lured into the clubhouse.... Take responsibility for your actions.) (2) Comments in the works of Roger Kahn, however, suggested to this writer that Baseball Annies may have had a more profound effect on organized baseball than previously thought. Kahn has written that while Jackie Robinson was in Florida for spring training in 1946 with the Montreal Royals, an armed sheriff ordered Robinson off the field, saying, Down here ... we don't have nigras mixing with Not marrying with Not playing ball with whites. (3) Because of such attitudes Kahn felt that white female fans and Baseball Annies may have contributed to Major League Baseball's longtime ban on black players. This paper examines that surmise. For the purposes of this paper I include both white Baseball Annies and white women who were black players' fans, girlfriends, and wives. While these categories include women of very different motivations and values, historically all such liaisons were viewed as scandalous and even, at times, illegal. EYEING BALLPLAYERS It helps to recall that the excesses of Baseball Annies did not emanate from the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Women were eyeing ballplayers from the get-go of organized baseball. In the year that the Cincinnati Reds became the first fully professional ball club, women of questionable repute were advertising themselves at the ballpark, according to this 1869 report in the Cincinnati Commercial: Known to the sporting world as 'Maude, the pet blond' . …