Rarely is an athlete paid the outpouring of tributes that erupted after Tony Gwynn died last week. Every word spoken about the Hall of Fame hitter was effusively positive. No one had a bad word to say about Gwynn. How could anyone? Excuse me, but I have a bad word to say about Gwynn.
He was dumb.
At the age of 54, which he was when he died June 16, would Gwynn have jumped off a bridge? Would he have sealed himself in a garage with the car motor running? Would he have placed a shotgun under his chin and pulled the trigger?
He would not have committed any of those suicidal acts. Gwynn killed himself nevertheless. The Hall of Famer’s method, however, was more benign and subtle than the ways people intent on killing themselves usually do it.
Gwynn killed himself with smokeless tobacco.
Maybe it’s unfair to talk about Gwynn killing himself; maybe it’s too severe to say that he was dumb.
“I’m on your side,” said Joe Garagiola Sr., for years an advocate against players’ use of smokeless tobacco when I told him my view of Gwynn’s fatal habit, “but it’s a deadly addictive habit.”
Garagiola dispelled any doubt that smokeless tobacco was the cause of Gwynn’s cancer.
According to Garagiola, “Tony said the doctor said he wasn’t sure tobacco caused it but Tony said ‘I know it was tobacco because it was exactly where the spot came up is where I put it.’”
A lawyer in his 40s whom I know and who has used dip at least half of his life offered his assessment of the addiction to smokeless tobacco. “Having quit smoking and drinking and trying to quit dipping,” he said, “the other two were so much easier.”
I don’t know how long Gwynn used smokeless tobacco or whether he ever quit or tried to quit using. Maybe he derived greater pleasure from his years of putting that junk between his lower lip and his gums than he would have from another method.
Maybe he even thought it helped him accumulate his 3,141 hits, 19 successive seasons of hitting better than .300, a .338 career batting average and eight National League batting championships. But smokeless tobacco killed him at the very young age of 54.
“Tony’s wife pulled me aside one day,” Garagiola related in a telephone interview, “and said, ‘Joe, would you mind talking to Tony to see if you could get him to stop using that stuff?’”
No one was ever able to get Gwynn to stop dipping. “It’s so addictive,” Garagiola said.
My lawyer friend said he quit twice, neither time permanently. “It’s insane to do it,” he said. “There’s no justification. The couple times I had some success I’d use nicotine gum combined with mint leaves.
“I don’t know why I started again after I quit. There’s never a good reason. Part of it is habit, but there’s a huge powerful physical and mental addictive component. If I set a date to stop, two, three days before I’d freak out.”
Garagiola, who used to visit spring training camps, meeting with players in an attempt to get them to throw away their tins of dip, told a similar story of dip recidivism.
“When I was going to clubhouses,” the former catcher recalled, “a player came up to me and said ‘I’m a dipper and I’m not going to do it anymore.’ Four days later I went back to the clubhouse and saw him. He said ‘I threw it away. The same night I started dipping again.’”
Players did not always appreciate Garagiola’s presence.
“Players would come up to me,” he related, “and say ‘why don’t you keep your friggin’ mouth closed.’”
In some of his clubhouse visits Garagiola did show-and-tell for the players. He brought with him a former major league outfielder, Bill Tuttle, who played for three American League teams in the 1950s and ‘60s. Cancer from his use of smokeless tobacco had eaten away much of Tuttle’s face.
“A girl who saw him said ‘I thought I was looking at a monster,’” the 88-year-old Garagiola said. Tuttle died in 1998 at the age of 69.
People make a fuss over the use of steroids in baseball, but to my knowledge steroids have never killed a baseball player. They might have affected a player’s health, but there is no clear-cut evidence of any deaths linked to steroids. There is, on the other hand, demonstrative evidence that smokeless tobacco has killed players.
Like steroids and major league players’ use of them, it also has an effect on young athletes, particularly baseball players.
“High school and college kids think it’s a badge of honor,” Garagiola said. “They’re like the big leaguers.”
“It’s like it’s part of the game,” a high school athlete told me. “Big leaguers do it. A freshman comes in and sees a senior, a leader of the team, dipping, and you say OK, and you do it. Dip is almost viewed as part of the game.”
This athlete, a varsity baseball and football player, acknowledged that he has dipped, though he said he didn’t know why he started, and he provided a fairly detailed picture of dipping’s use as he has seen it.
“It varies from class to class,” he said. “In my senior class it’s not as big in football as it is in baseball. It’s probably 60 percent in baseball, more than half the team, maybe two-thirds.
“I think the big reason it’s so common in athletes is you realize you can’t smoke cigarettes and you can’t smoke weed or drink alcohol and perform at a high level. I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life, but if I smoked I’d do it playing football.”
He paused and asked if he had to be politically correct. Told he didn’t, he continued:
“Dipping is much more white than black. Tobacco is more a white thing than a black thing. I have hundreds of black friends and not one dips. In baseball, especially in the northeast, you don’t see black kids dip. And it’s not in the culture of football.”
It would be nice to think that football players are more intelligent than baseball players where smokeless tobacco is concerned, but it probably wouldn’t be a good idea for a football player to block and tackle and be blocked and tackled with a foreign substance in your mouth. But then, it’s not too bright of any high school or college kid to put a foreign substance in his mouth.
“It’s stupid, very stupid,” the high school athlete said. “If you ask a high school athlete why he dips, he couldn’t tell you.” But, he added, “Even though you know the dangers – and I think kids are fully aware – I don’t think you worry about it.”
Nor is any user lured into using by thinking it will help performance. “It’s definitely not a performance enhancer,” my high schooler said.
What does it do? “When you first start dipping,’ he said, “you get a buzz from the nicotine.” He added, “I don’t think the athletes are addicted.”
Maybe not in high school. But Gwynn didn’t want to or was unable to quit.
The baseball commissioner, Bud Selig, would like all players to quit and has gained some leverage in his quest.
A few years ago Selig was at Memorial Sloan Kettering hospital in New York getting his annual checkup for skin cancer and had an interesting conversation with his doctor on the subject of smokeless tobacco.
“I see these people chewing,” Selig said his doctor told him. “You understand how dangerous it is. I operate on people all day long who do this.”
“I worry about the health of the players,” the commissioner said. “I do feel strongly about it. My doctor told me you have over 50 percent chance of getting cancer. That’s stunning.”
I have mixed feelings about it. While I don’t like players serving as models for kids who want to do what Tony did, I don’t like the idea of Major League Baseball telling adults that they can’t use products that are legal.
If the Tony Gwynns of the baseball world want to be stupid and kill themselves, that should be their prerogative. If they can be convinced that long life is better than premature death, all the better.
Selig said Rob Manfred, his chief operating officer, and Tony Clark, the union’s executive director, “are going to have to sit down” and work out a solution. “We’ve banned it in the minors,” Selig said. “It reminds me of steroids.
Garagiola mentioned frequent talk of Selig’s legacy as he prepares to retire in January and said, “What a legacy it would be if he banned it.”
Selig, however, can’t ban smokeless tobacco in the majors any more than he could unilaterally institute steroids penalties. He was able to take action on steroids and smokeless tobacco in the minors because the union doesn’t represent minor league players. The union would have to approve any steps taken on smokeless tobacco, just as it had to approve testing and penalties for use of steroids. The union didn’t have to endorse a ban on steroids because steroids are illegal in the United States without a prescription.
The union and the commissioner’s office were able to agree on some restrictions on the use of smokeless tobacco in their negotiations for the current collective bargaining agreement.
Included in the 2011 labor contract as Attachment 28, the smokeless tobacco policy calls for an educational program, a list of professionals and organizations that aid players who want to quit using and annual oral exams of players.
Clubhouse personnel can no longer supply tobacco tins in the clubhouse as they had for decades. Players, though, can bring containers into the clubhouse themselves.
The attachment bans use of the substance during televised interviews and player appearances on behalf of the clubs. Players cannot carry tobacco tins or packages in their uniforms. That provision eliminates the once prevalent familiar outline of a cylindrical tobacco tin in the back pocket of a player’s uniform.
The agreement calls for warnings for the first two violations and fines of $1,000, $2,500 and $5,000 for the next three violations, which will be cumulative over a player’s career.
Obviously the penalties are minor compared with penalties for positive tests for use of performance-enhancing substances, but they represent a first in baseball.
Clark, the union’s leader, reacting uncharacteristically of his predecessors over nearly half a century, did not return a telephone call seeking comment on the union’s view on a possible future ban on the use of smokeless tobacco.
Garagiola, on the other hand, said, “If Tony Gwynn’s death lights a fire to get this thing solved so that no one is using it, we’ll never forget Tony Gwynn.”
CATCHER GOES WAY OF PITCHERS
Pitchers can’t hog the elbow surgery market all to themselves. The Tommy John operation that is the rage this year has to include some players who play other positions.
Matt Wieters, the Orioles’ catcher, is the most prominent non-pitcher who has had the operation this year. Dr. James Andrews – who else? – performed the elbow ligament transplant last Tuesday. Barring complications, the 24-year-old catcher is expected to be ready for next season.
“I’m told the players can come back a little bit sooner than pitchers, eight or nine months as opposed to one year,” Dan Duquette, the Baltimore general manager, said.
Wieters went on the disabled list May 11 and waited five weeks to have the transplant. “He gave it some time to rest and he was trying to see if he could continue to play,” Duquette said. “He found out it was still bothering him when he threw.”
The injury was apparently three weeks in the making. “He said he had an issue in Boston in a Sunday night game in April. He tried to throw from his knees and that aggravated it.”
Depending on how long a torn ulnar collateral ligament takes to develop, the ailment could stem from pitching. “He pitched in college,” Duquette said. “He caught and closed.”
Wieters last pitched at Georgia Tech in 2007.
Among other current non–pitchers who have had Tommy John surgery are Carl Crawford, Rafael Furcal, Shin-Soo Choo, Matt Holliday, Carlos Quentin. Kelly Johnson and Xavier Nady (twice).
Among players who are retired but had the transplant during their careers were Paul Molitor, Jose Canseco, Luis Gonzalez, Rusty Greer and Rocco Baldelli.
ROSE OFF BASE YET AGAIN
Pete Rose last week made one of his periodic appearances in the news media, doing an interview with ESPN.com. Banned from Major League Baseball the last 25 years, the all-time hits leader said he would like a second chance to work in baseball.
The man doesn’t get it, never has, apparently never will. He had 15 years of second chances but squandered them all. For 15 years he lied. He lied to baseball, he lied to the news media, he lied to the fans.
For 15 years he continued to contend that he didn’t bet on baseball. Not until he published a book in 2004 did he admit that he bet on baseball. But even then he continued to lie, saying he never placed bets on baseball from his manager’s office. John Dowd, the Washington. D.C., who investigated Rose’s gambling for MLB, produced voluminous evidence that showed Rose placed baseball bets from his office.
I have no evidence of my own to prove this view, but I believe if Rose, sometime early in that 15-year, post-ban period, had admitted what he had done and acknowledged he was wrong for having done it, his application for reinstatement would have been approved.
It was then that he should have sought a second chance and gone about it in the right way. Rose last applied for reinstatement in 1997. I asked Commissioner Bud Selig the other day about the status of the application.
“It’s under review,” he said, saying what he has said for 17 years. This time, though, he added, “It’s a sensitive matter.”