The Dark Side of the Diamond

Cleat Chasers

I remember the first time I heard the term “cleat chaser.” It was 2014, two weeks into my Baseball in America Tour, down in Fort Myers, Florida. I had gone to a college baseball game and struck up a conversation with a few women in the stands who were following their team. One of them was surprisingly open about her relationship with one of the players. Her friend laughed and called themselves cleat chasers, explaining how they loved watching the boys in their tight-fitting uniforms.

I interviewed them that day and wrote a story with the title Cleat Chasers. At the time, I had a rule that I would not post something unless the people I talked to approved it first. This time I skipped that step. I thought it was a good piece. I didn’t demean them, I just wrote what they told me. But when I posted it, a shit storm broke out. They felt I hadn’t portrayed them properly, and even though they knew they were on the record, they didn’t like how it landed. I took the post down. That was my first real lesson in how raw, messy, and complicated this subject can be.

Cleat chasing is not just a funny phrase, it is a subculture around baseball. Players know it. Fans whisper about it. Writers sometimes poke at it but rarely dig too deep because it gets uncomfortable. Baseball sells family and wholesomeness, but the road life is a different story. Night after night in hotels and bars across America, players are chased by a certain kind of fan, people who are not there for the game but for the players.

In the seventies and eighties, players talked about hotel lobbies filled with women waiting to latch onto rookies and veterans alike. By the nineties the slang stuck, cleat chasers. Some even kept scorebooks of who they had been with, treating players like stats on a card. It wasn’t always dangerous, but sometimes it was. Players got drugged and robbed. Pregnancies turned into lawsuits. Obsessions crossed into stalking. Eddie Waitkus nearly died in 1949 when a fan lured him to a hotel room and shot him. That was not called cleat chasing then, but it was the same energy.

Even the legends fed the culture. Mark Grace of the Cubs joked about his slump busters, sleeping with less attractive women to break out of hitting slumps. Derek Jeter was rumored to hand out gift baskets after one night stands. The 1986 Mets, fueled by cocaine and chaos, bragged about sneaking women into the clubhouse during games. Lenny Dykstra, Jose Canseco, David Wells, they all admitted it. Some laughed about it. Others spiraled into addictions and broken marriages because of it.

The dark side here is not just sex. It is power, obsession, and the way baseball’s road life feeds both. The long season, the endless travel, the loneliness of hotel rooms, it all creates a vacuum that cleat chasers fill. Sometimes it is harmless fun. Other times it turns psycho.

That day in Fort Myers, I thought I had stumbled onto a quirky little story about college baseball culture. What I did not realize then was that I was brushing up against one of baseball’s open secrets. Cleat chasing has always been part of the game. Baseball just does not like to talk about it.