How new laws banning chewing tobacco could change MLB

In the 1990s, when airplanes went smoke-free, the ban did not extend to one place: the cockpit. Concern about pilots suffering nicotine fits or losing their ability to fly due to withdrawal prompted an exception. Then the federal government called Dr. Michael Fiore, asked him to apply his smoking-cessation magic and watched as pilot after pilot quit.

“And that’s a great analogy for baseball,” said Fiore, the director of the University of Wisconsin Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention. “They’ve got similar concerns. ‘It’s going to distract me.’ ‘I’m going to lose my performance edge.’ If you follow tobacco control over the last 50-plus years, since the first surgeon’s general report in 1964, every step along the way we heard the same arguments. You can’t do it because it won’t work.”

New laws are about to test Fiore’s theory that anti-tobacco measures can work – even in baseball, a sport whose history is pickled in tobacco spit. Ordinances banning chewing tobacco at stadiums in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Boston went into place during opening week. Chicago soon will join in on the ban, and once a state-wide law in California is instituted in 2017, a full one-third of major league teams will feel the pinch instead of taking one.

Already, the blowback is palpable.

“I can’t tell you how many patients I’ve treated over time who have been able to overcome their dependence on booze and illicit substances but have been unable to overcome their dependence on tobacco,” Fiore said. “It speaks to what an incredibly powerful and insidious hold it has on people. Unlike booze or illicit drugs, it doesn’t change your capacity to live everyday life. And in that way, the insidious hold it has on you can be greater.”

Nevertheless, Fiore is confident baseball can kick its habit, a hard sell to the estimated 30 percent of players that use. Though chewing tobacco is banned in the minor leagues, players still sneak surreptitious dips without penalty. The habit carries over to the major leagues, where players love their chew enough to fight against a proposed league-wide ban by Major League Baseball during the last collective-bargaining negotiations. Considering the new laws, and the pressure for other stadiums to follow, the issue is once again expected to be on the bargaining table this year as the league and union try to hammer out a new basic agreement. In the meantime, MLB has suggested it could discipline players who chew at tobacco-free stadiums.

Jake Peavy used to dip. The San Francisco Giants starter said he quit, something a number of players with a connection to the San Diego Padres did after Hall of Famer and frequent tobacco chewer Tony Gwynn died of salivary-gland cancer. (The connection between tobacco and salivary-gland cancer, incidentally, is not causal, according to studies.) Peavy still takes issue with the laws.

“I have a hard time thinking it makes sense,” he said. “We’re all grown men. It’s hard to take that away from people who are adults.”

The civil-liberty argument is a popular one in baseball, and it echoes the complaints during the first generation of laws that banned smoking in bars and restaurants. Eventually, Fiore said, people get used to them and change. And just in case some in baseball can’t, he said, the nicotine-replacement therapy available, whether via a lozenge or patch or nose spray, can combine with counseling to ensure it sticks.

“Among ballplayers, sure, there are the loud, complainer types out there that are bitching about the policy,” Fiore said. “But for the most part, ballplayers are like most other people who use tobacco. They rue the day they became addicted. They have a monkey on their back. They’re putting themselves and their families at risk. This policy does not say that have to quit. They can use smokeless on their own. What they say is the ball fields need to be tobacco-free so they can be the sacred place they should be.”

This moral argument is the weakest Fiore proffers, essentially propagating the athletes-are-role-models trope that gets trotted out not just with every vice but every whit of what one might consider bad behavior. Yes, smokeless tobacco use among high school athletes rose 11 percent from 2001 to 2013 while smoking rates cratered, according to a report by the Center for Disease Control. Blaming professional athletes simplifies a problem with far more sociological elements.

Far more powerful a case came Thursday via this video from Curt Schilling talking about how chewing tobacco caused his oral cancer. Pain tinged his voice. Fear was palpable. This was real, infinitely more compelling than the unnecessary straw men anti-tobacco advocates care to concoct.

The lobby is coming strong after baseball, sending a letter two weeks ago to commissioner Rob Manfred and union chief Tony Clark that urged them to ban tobacco sport wide. More than 30 groups focused on health signed the letter. It wasn’t a declaration of war so much as a reminder that anti-tobacco legislation has a near-undefeated record, and it’s better to be on the right side of history.

Fiore’s is long and prosperous, and he believes baseball’s can be, too, if players work together and buy in to the idea of quitting. He started helping people in 1988 when he worked as part of the Center For Disease Control’s Office on Smoking and Health. For nearly 30 years in the business, he has seen countless athletes, and even a pair of baseball players.

Though Fiore won’t name them, he was content with the results. “Both, I’m happy to say, quit,” Fiore said, and that gives him the sort of hope that as powerful as tobacco may be, as insidious a hold as it has, not even baseball can stop the anti-tobacco industry from getting what it desires.

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