Chew on This! ! ! Tobacco Gnaws at Player Health

Tobacco is as firmly rooted in the lore of baseball as it is the jowls of its players.

Can you picture Lenny Dykstra without imagining that distorted profile, his cheek distended by the glob of chew?

What about that commercial millions of fans saw repeatedly during Saturday afternoon games of the week? “Just a pinch between your cheek and gum . . . “ it went, a tag line still familiar more than a decade later.

Cameras catch Florida Marlins Manager Jim Leyland smoking in the dugout and Darryl Strawberry putting a handful--that is no pinch--in his mouth before a playoff game and we laugh at the image of players and coaches with spittle dragging down their chins.

Bill Tuttle does not laugh anymore. Not after the operations that took muscle from his right arm, a flap of skin from his breast and neck, and gristle from his leg to rebuild a cheek corroded by a cancer whose name he cannot even pronounce, a cancer caused by the tobacco he began chewing while a Detroit Tiger and which he chewed for 37 years.

The New York Mets’ Pete Harnisch is only the most visible player to struggle with the addiction, one that means Tuttle will never eat steak and french fries again, will spend the rest of his life subsisting on applesauce and soup and eggs and boiled hamburger. Tuttle cannot play golf because the muscle was taken from his right arm, and cannot--in the most horrible irony--toss a baseball with his grandchildren.

It was Tuttle’s agony, conveyed in a tour of spring training sites, that convinced Harnisch to quit a habit he developed when he was a freshman at Fordham.

It is Tuttle’s agony that is at the forefront of major league baseball’s nascent attempts to educate its players about the dangers of something that is as much a part of baseball’s culture as pine tar.

“If somebody had told me 40 years ago, I don’t think I would have started,” Tuttle said, his words sometimes difficult to understand because of the operations. “The main thing we’d like them to know is if you’re going to keep chewing, go in and have a trainer look at your mouth.”

The National Spit Tobacco Education Program has been available since 1994, but only in the past two years has baseball made its first serious attempt, using this independent program, to help its finest players avoid and conquer an addiction doctors say is as insidious as heroin.

“We’ve had players who have had surgery to remove lesions in their mouths,” says Philadelphia Phillies trainer Jeff Cooper. “And they had dip back in their mouth before the stitches were out. It doesn’t stop them. Nor does having their teeth replaced.”

According to a study conducted in 1993 by the Centers for Disease Control, just 4% of men aged 18 or older use smokeless tobacco. But Cooper says use is “extremely prevalent” in baseball. On last year’s Philadelphia Phillies team, there were few users. But after an off-season of turnovers and trades, he guesses up to 65% of his players now use.

The Mets say they do not supply tobacco products to their players. And while a New York Yankees clubhouse attendant said the team does not provide such products either, one Yankee player who requested anonymity refuted that, saying tobacco products are made available to players in the clubhouse lounge.

Dr. Herb Severson of the Oregon Research Institute, who toured spring training sites with the Tuttles and Joe Garagiola--who spearheads the NSTEP campaign--says surveys of two teams during spring training show that about 38% of players use smokeless tobacco.

More disturbing is a National Cancer Institute study from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Of 1,000 players in the major and minor leagues, 72% who used tobacco year round had lesions in their mouths. If they used four or more tins in a week, the figure jumped to 80%.

“It’s very much a part of the culture and particularly among players with a lot of downtime, so pitchers are more vulnerable,” Severson said. “I was talking to a designated hitter and when he was playing regularly, he didn’t use and when he became a DH, he took it up. It’s a boredom thing.”

Baseball has banned the use of tobacco in the minor leagues--at the stadium, in the clubhouse, on team buses, even in the back pocket. Violations, spotted by managers or umpires, are to be reported to the commissioner’s office in New York.

In the Carolina League, where the sides of neighboring buildings serve as enormous billboards for local tobacco companies, the walls of a clubhouse are decorated with posters of ulcerated mouths. The president of the league, John Leonard, says he has never received notice of more than two violations in a year. But the ban applies only to players while they are involved in team activities, including games, during the season and it clearly is created as much for the benefit of young fans as for current players.

“We ban it hopeful that when they reach the majors they won’t pick it up or won’t start using it again if they had quit,” says Major League Baseball spokesman Rich Levin. “In a number of years, it may be phased out. That’s the thinking, anyway. It may be wishful thinking.”

Of course it is. During the tours of spring training sites, Severson says the greatest response frequently came from minor leaguers. As many as a dozen players approached the speakers after sessions, he said.

But nobody close to baseball says a ban is feasible at the major-league level: If a rookie leaguer won’t listen, how can you tell someone making $10 million a year that he can’t consume a legal substance?

The focus at the top level is on education, not legislation. That is why NSTEP has Dykstra--who has quit his habit in the year he has been out of the game--filming commercials. It is why next year the group will conduct oral exams during spring training. It is why Cooper, who quit using tobacco 12 years ago but thinks he would resume the habit quickly if he picked up a pinch now, is so strident in his belief that trainers must be more active in getting nicotine patches and gum to players who need it, in being a direct conduit to the experts who can help the most, rather than referring players to the teams’ employee assistance programs. He is most encouraged by the growing cadre of cessation experts and counselors available to help players. He hopes that someday all dentists and doctors who treat players will be trained to do oral exams, too.

“It’s a habit that rarely someone gives up one time and they’re done with it,” Cooper said. “They feel awful when they fall back. We’re starting to develop a pretty good network of people to help them. A lot of people need a support network--the family, the clubhouse, the team.”

When the Tuttles spoke this spring, they were greeted warmly in some places, with indifference and even a bit of resentment in others. After they spoke to the Phillies, Cooper says three players walked into his office and asked for nicotine patches. One Phillies pitcher, who is trying to quit right now, is using patches and gum in his fourth attempt to stop.

But as with decades-long efforts to get Americans to stop smoking, this is going to be a long, laborious process.

“One guy said, ‘I’m an adult and I’ll do what I want to do,’ ” Bill Tuttle said. “One got up and left when we started talking and went to the training room. He didn’t want to hear what we had to say. But one of the Giants’ minor-league pitchers walked up to my wife and handed her a can of Copenhagen and said, ‘I want you to keep this. This is the last one I’ll ever chew.’ ”

And so the Tuttles went home to Anoka, Minn., hopeful that their spring’s work is enough. The travel is difficult for them. Bill was taken off chemotherapy recently because it was making him sick, but he has been cancer-free for a year. He has gained back 50 of the 75 pounds he lost and he sleeps lying down again, after six months of sitting upright all day and all night.

Still, Gloria Tuttle says this: “I feel bitter and I feel angry.”

And during the tour, Bill sometimes had to stop, open a vial and swallow pills. At age 67, he is unlikely to ever be without them again.

“I don’t have real bad pain,” he said. “I still take pain medicine. I used to take it five or six times a day. Now I take it when I get up and when I go to bed. I make sure I have medicine with me. I keep one in the car and one at home. I don’t know what would happen if I went 24 or 36 hours without it. I don’t know how bad it would get.”