Take Tobacco Out Of The Lineup!

While chewing tobacco is as much a part of baseball as red clay, its connection with the sport may be coming to an end

It's possible that even diehard baseball fans have never heard of Bill Tuttle. However, Tuttle was known as one of baseball's most reliable outfielders in his day. From 1952 to 1963, Tuttle played center field for the Tigers, the Kansas City Athletics and the Twins, amassing a respectable .259 lifetime batting average.

Unfortunately, Bill Tuttle is also known for something else — he is one of a long, tragic line of professional baseball players, including greats like Babe Ruth, who suffered from some form of oral cancer. In Tuttle's case, surgeons had to remove large portions of his cheek and jaw bone, leaving him permanently disfigured.

Before he succumbed to cancer in 1998 at the age of 69, Tuttle waged a campaign to alert people, especially parents, of the dangers of the substance that led to his disease and death, smokeless tobacco — linked as closely to baseball as “popcorn, peanuts and Cracker Jack®.”

Tobacco's Long Relationship With Baseball

As in no other sport, “chewing” tobacco has been a part of the culture of baseball, and from the very beginning. In baseball's early years in the mid-Nineteenth Century, the game was mostly played on dirt fields. Since consuming water was thought to make one feel too heavy, players would instead chew tobacco to keep their mouths moist in the dusty parks. Players also used tobacco spit to soften leather mitts and gloves and to give the spitball its wild gyrations.

Smokeless tobacco's popularity among baseball players rose and fell with the times, most often trading places with cigarettes and cigars. Chewing tobacco fell out of favor in the late nineteenth century due to the belief that it caused the spread of tuberculosis. In the early twentieth century it again rose to prominence until after World War II when cigarettes became more popular in the United States.

Cigarettes reached their heyday in baseball during the 1950s when teams had sponsored brands. New York Giants fans, for instance, showed their team loyalty by smoking only Chesterfield Cigarettes. Baseball cards were often packaged with cigarette packs.

When the Surgeon General's report highlighted the links between smoking tobacco, heart disease and cancer, the tide turned again in the 1960s and 1970s. Players took up smokeless tobacco again, especially snuff which was beginning to surpass regular chewing tobacco in popularity, in the belief that it was a safer product than cigarettes.

What do you think? Are products like Big League Chew®, which closely resemble chewing tobacco, encouraging or discouraging the use of chewing tobacco by teenagers?

Since then, smokeless tobacco has dominated the sport of baseball, from the major leagues down to the high school level. And just like the targeted cigarette marketing of the fifties, manufacturers of smokeless tobacco have promoted their products use to ball players, even providing free samples in major league clubhouses.

While the tobacco products and styles may have changed, smokeless tobacco's popularity is rooted in the same cultural belief among players and fans: baseball players chew tobacco — it's just part of the game.

Perhaps one of the most potent symbols of this deep connection, especially among children and young people, is a chewing gum product known as Big League Chew®. First introduced in 1980, the product consists of shredded bubble gum (which resembles loose chewing tobacco) packaged in an aluminum foil pouch — similar to the packaging of chewing tobacco — with the cartoon image of a baseball player on the outside. While candy cigarettes — another symbolic tobacco product aimed at a young audience — fell out of favor years ago, Big League Chew® continues to be a popular product.