Don't ballplayers deserve a little privacy?

by Kevin Hench

Updated: May 8, 2008, 3:53 PM EST

Tell us what you think

Kevin Hench's column on blow-up dolls in the White Sox clubhouse has started a debate. Join the discussion!

The clubhouse. The locker room. Or, in hockey, just "the room."

Once the sanctum where men could be men or men could be arrested adolescents or men could be raging jackasses, the room is now merely another stage — like the mound or the batter's box — where ballplayers can have their limitations, prejudices and idiosyncrasies relentlessly and mercilessly judged.

Those limitations were on full, lurid display in Toronto last Sunday when the Chicago White Sox staged a graphic scene by arranging their bats around two inflatable sex dolls in a futile effort to exorcise the demons that had accursed the team during a six-game losing streak.

Signs on the dolls read "Let's Go White Sox" and "You've Got to Push," an apparent invitation to change the bad mojo of a bat via insertion.

Okay, it's not exactly Mrs. Dalloway (who, by the way, would hit fifth in this lineup).

But to observe the limitations, prejudices and idiosyncrasies of these ballplayers (in what was once their natural habitat, but is now a glassed-in public terrarium) and ascribe nefarious motivations of sexual intimidation to them says more about the audience than the presenters.

This is something out of Major League or Bull Durham, not Zeke Mowatt and Lisa Olson.

Do some pro athletes view women narrowly as sex objects? Undoubtedly. So do some Fortune 500 CEOs. And the occasional senator from Louisiana or governor from New York.

But when the White Sox say their déclassé diorama was intended merely as a slumpbuster, we should take them at their word. Not because ballplayers aren't capable of demeaning women, but because they are incapable of subtext.

One could argue that this elaborately staged slumpbuster is actually considerably less demeaning to women than the traditional one night stand with an unattractive woman that has long been accepted as the quickest way out of an 0-for-16 (though Bill James has never broken this down for us).

Baseball is a filthy business, rife with stories that would make David Mamet blush. Most of them revolve around the toilet or sex or, as the story goes with one former NL slugger, both.

Which brings us to inflatable sex dolls. Isn't their mere existence a running joke about how pathetic men are? And didn't that joke lose its shock value in 1987? By the time Old School rolled around in 2003, Will Ferrell was just sort of listlessly carrying one under his arm, a quiet testament to how benign they had become. Lars and the Real Girl? Yawn.

Even the high-brow New Yorker ran a cartoon of a businessman leaving his office with a blow-up doll for its caption contest two weeks ago.

Let's face it, blow-up doll comedy is more hacky than salacious.

It's not always easy defending the caveman, and Cro-Magnons like Ozzie Guillen don't make it any easier. He's a clown and an extremely unfunny one at that.

But on Dollgate, he's got it just right.

"We weren't trying to disrespect anybody or hurt anybody," Guillen told the Chicago Sun-Times. "We were just trying to have fun. A lot of people took it the wrong way."

A big league clubhouse is a pretty miserable place during a losing streak. Tension builds. Steam accumulates. The pressure has to be released at some point.

Guillen gone wild

Video: Watch as White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen goes on a classic rant about his team's place in the hearts of Chicago fans.

Sometimes this means Lou Piniella and Rob Dibble or Steve Garvey and Don Sutton rolling around on the floor together or Hal McRae destroying his office. Sometimes it means arranging your bats around a pair of sex dolls.

And when you share your locker room with the media, you share your inflatable sex toys with the world.

From taking a called third strike to pulling on his underwear, a ballplayer exists under the constant scrutiny of the media horde. Why can't he have a sanctuary beyond the trainer's room?

Given how totally devoid of revelation 95 percent of all player quotes are anyway, do the fans really need reporters to have access to the locker room? (And don't most reporters, in fact, dread this part of their job?) I mean, just make the manager, the winning or losing pitcher and a guy with a couple of hits available in a press room and we're done, right?

They may be crude, unsophisticated rubes compared to Virginia Woolf, but ballplayers deserve a room of their own too.