At the Margins of the Minors:
Good Girls, Bad Girls, and
Baseball Beyond the Big Leagues
ABSTRACT
This paper examines the experiences o f minor league baseball
groupies, focusing on the exchange relationships that they form with
players. As two types o f exchanges emerged, we discovered two types
o f groupies who are marginally attached to the world o f one
particular minor league baseball team. Contrary to some popular
writers, who suggest that all groupies have similar motives and
relationships with players, we find that “good girl” groupies and
“bad girl ” groupies create remarkably different relationships with
players. This paper details how we discovered these two types o f
groupies.
Sport groupies are often portrayed in popular culture as seductive
vixens. For example, sexually aggressive female fans are infamously prominent
in the movies Bull Durham and The Natural. While many such depictions
permeate American popular culture, few scholars have systematically
investigated sport groupies, limiting their analysis to categorizing groupies
according to their sport. This paper examines minor league baseball seeking to
categorize sport groupie-athlete relationships relative to the experiences of
groupies. These relationships reflect broader structures and processes in
American society which: (1) reinforce an inequitable, patriarchal social structure
in which women attempt to obtain status via a male benefactor; and (2)
disempower women through sexual objectification and commodification.
REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE
Early popular writing on groupies was largely documentary in nature,
focusing on rock and roll musicians and the women who pursued them, as the
film Almost Famous romanticizes. Connie Hamzy (“Sweet Connie”), Pamela
Des Barres, and the Plastercasters are some of the most notorious original rock
and roll groupies, whose stories emerged in the 1980s (Balfour 1986; Des Barres
1987). However, very little academic literature has addressed sport groupies in
particular.
The Prominence o f the American Athlete
When a community elevates athletes into a superior class through
prestige and economic rewards, athletes enjoy a unique position. The