Baseball
When the rules of baseball were first written in 1845, the carcinogenic potential of chewing tobacco was unknown. At that time, it was commonly used by players and coaches alike. Smokeless tobacco use became rampant by players by the early 1900s. They liked chewing tobacco because it kept their mouths (and their mitts) moist on the dusty infield. The use of chewing tobacco in baseball steadily increased until the mid-20th century, when cigarettes became popular and took the place of some players' smokeless tobacco habit. As shown below, a number of notable players have died of oral cancer as a result. Joe Garagiola, who quit, warns about chewing tobacco:
"I tell these guys, 'You may not like what I say, but with lung cancer you die of lung cancer,'" ... "With oral cancer, you die one piece at a time. They operate on your neck, they operate on your jaw, they operate on your throat."Read more about this topic: Chewing Tobacco
Famous quotes containing the word baseball:
“It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“The talk shows are stuffed full of sufferers who have regained their health—congressmen who suffered through a serious spell of boozing and skirt-chasing, White House aides who were stricken cruelly with overweening ambition, movie stars and baseball players who came down with acute cases of wanting to trash hotel rooms while under the influence of recreational drugs. Most of them have found God, or at least a publisher.”
—Calvin Trillin (b. 1935)
“I don’t like comparisons with football. Baseball is an entirely different game. You can watch a tight, well-played football game, but it isn’t exciting if half the stadium is empty. The violence on the field must bounce off a lot of people. But you can go to a ball park on a quiet Tuesday afternoon with only a few thousand people in the place and thoroughly enjoy a one-sided game. Baseball has an aesthetic, intellectual appeal found in no other team sport.”
—Bowie Kuhn (b. 1926)