Baseball and Tobacco

Maybe steroids aren't the biggest problem?

Steroids are a big issue now but even bigger should be chewing tobacco.

By: Aaron Cole

English

With all of the hype on the use of steroids in the past month among the baseball community, I think that baseball should also look at another serious affect to its players, chewing tobacco.

Chewing tobacco and smoking tobacco has been affiliated with baseball since the 1840s mainly in the amateur leagues. A custom to the winning team would celebrate by lighting up a cigar after the game. But as more immigrants joined baseball through the 1860s and 1870s they brought their culture of rolling their own cigarettes and or chewing tobacco.

As baseball grew in popularity so did the tobacco. The tobacco industry used baseball imagery to advertise cigarettes to young men - ads featuring baseball greats like DiMaggio and Ted Williams. The billboard ads spread through the major and minor league ballparks into the early 1990s.

Not only does chewing tobacco increase your chances of getting Oral cancer but it can also lead to other types of cancer within your body with many deadly chemicals that are in chew.

Oral cancer includes cancers of the lip, tongue, cheek, throat, gums, roof and floor of mouth, and voice box (larynx). Surgery to treat oral cancer is often extensive and can disfigure your face and may involve removing parts of the face, tongue, cheek or lip. Oral cancer, like lung cancer, is associated with low survival rates. On average, half of all oral cancer victims are dead within 5 years of diagnosis.

The most noticeable type of cancer that you can get from chewing is called Leukoplakia. Leukoplakia is pre-cancerous areas in your mouth that's a white rough area where you would place the tobacco. Leukoplakia is the common form of oral cancer. After a period of time that white rough part of your mouth will advent ally turn into oral cancer.

The other types of cancer that are possible to get are pharynx, larynx and esophagus cancers. These types of cancers will develop if the chewer decides to swallow the chew spit. Some danger signs of these types of cancer are: a prolonged sore throat, difficulty in chewing, and a feeling of something in the throat. Treating these types of cancer is a lot harder to cure and the user doesn't really know until it's too late!

The types of chemicals that are found in chewing tobacco besides Nicotine are Polonium 210 (nuclear waste), N-Nitrosamines (cancer-causing), Formaldehyde (embalming fluid) and Cadmium (used in car batteries). These chemicals in chew make you get the high feeling, and they also make it extremely hard to quit chewing.

The baseball community has taken some action against tobacco before, but it only put restrictions against chewing tobacco for the minor league teams.

The first major contribution from the baseball community came in 1994. Baseball ban chew from the minor leagues from the single A leagues to the triple A leagues. With this ban in place the use of chewing tobacco