Ready, Spit!

It's Muddy Waters' birthday and Martin Luther King's assassination anniversary yet again. Seems like a subject worth writing a poem about. If only I knew a poet.

It's also baseball season. Baseball is a wonderful sport and I love it. There are some intricate, archaic, and bizarre rules, both written and unwritten, and the game doesn’t always move too quickly. I fully understand and appreciate a lot of the complaints about baseball, whether they are in reference to the shortcomings of the game itself or matters like salary concerns and performance-enhancing substances. I’m not trying to convert nonbelievers. Still, I enjoy the game, the blend of nostalgia and timelessness, the eternal notion of summer. One of life’s most unexpected pleasures is traveling through an unfamiliar place and scanning the radio dial only to discover a baseball broadcast just beginning. This is particularly true if you happen to be in the middle of nowhere and pick up an AM signal from a distant city.

However, one aspect of baseball is so thoroughly jacked up that it cannot be defended by any reasonable person: chewing tobacco. For years now, pundits have, with some justification, obsessed over the use of performance-enhancing drugs off the field, but few have lamented the continued use of health-debilitating drugs on the field. Yes, it’s a tradition. But traditions have to be measured and assessed individually, not given carte blanche or, for that matter, universally assaulted. There’s nothing wrong with respect for traditions that are beneficial or even those that do neither harm nor good, but stupid, damaging traditions ought to be identified and confronted. Baseball is the only sport I know of that permits players to use a dangerous substance in plain sight while the game is going on. NBA players have a reputation for marijuana use, but I don’t see them lighting blunts during jump balls. Lawrence Taylor had a problem with cocaine, but he didn’t snort a line off of Joe Theisman’s helmet after shattering the lower half of Joe’s body. All right, so chewing tobacco is legal and the aforementioned substances are not, but if that’s your preoccupation, think of cigarettes instead. LeBron James isn’t about to light up a Marlboro on the foul line, is he?

So come on, Major League Baseball, at least join the second half of the 20^th Century while the rest of us are living in the 21^st. How many more people have to get throat or salivary cancer before you ban chewing tobacco on the playing surface? Obviously, you can’t control what players and managers do the rest of the time, but if they’re anywhere a camera can pick them up on game day—the dugout, the bullpen, the locker room, leading off of second base—this is a no-brainer. Pick whatever pretext you want, whether you want to use the “think of the children” angle or the “spitting on the field is disgusting” line, just get rid of the stuff!