Annie White grew up in Aledo, "just down the road from Suzy Bogguss," and worked for the Aledo Times Record during high school. Annie was a sports-journalism major at Augustana College, when she joined the Greens broadcast team in 1998 as color commentator and backup scorer, pairing up with John Dark. White left the booth at the end of the 2000 season. Two years was enough, she said at the time. "It has been a lot of fun, hard fun," Annie explained. "I learned a lot about the game, about myself, about John, about what I can and can't put up with." She gave few reasons then for her move. "It's just time to move on. For many reasons, some having to do with baseball, some with other things I'd rather not enter into"
Although she warmed to baseball under Dark's influence and admitted that when she left the booth she was "a far better and smarter baseball fan than when I first climbed on board," Annie described herself more broadly as "an enthusiast of all sports and all physical activity." In high school, she was a dedicated cross-country runner, but knee problems since then have limited her running. "I swim everyday in a heated pool. There's something primitive and womblike about it. It touches something raw in me. The feel of the body is part of why I'm interested in sports."
Although she was vague at the time, the events of early 2001 cast her departure from the Greens in a new light. While working as a free-lance journalist in Chicago, White she broke the story of the Piggate scandal, which provoked the ire of PETA and petaphiles across the land and turned former broadcast partner John Dark off pork permanently. "I had been on the edge anyway," explained Dark. "That just sealed it for me." The Piggate story earned White a regional Pulitzer nomination and helped her secure a full-time gig at the Chicago Tribune, where she now covers stories involving the business and corporate aspects of sports, contract law, etc.
Although she was liked well enough while employed by the Greens, the whiff of Piggate negated some of the supportive claims made about White. Some of the evidence for the story "smelled a little funny," said general manager Rolf Samuels. White's story named an anonymous source she dubbed Pigfoot, whom she said had supplied her copies of documents from within the organization, but Samuels suspects that White somehow got a copy of the confidential internal report itself. "She's not the little girl I once knew," said Dark. "I was blinded, but now I see," said Samuels. "Devil or angel, I can't make up my mind," said team atheist Liane Luckman. "She looked like an angel, talked like an angel, broadcast like an angel, but I got wise," said team ethicist Suzann Moertl. "There was always something a little trampy to her, if you know what I mean," said cultural liaison Dineen Grow. "And I generally like people, you know?"