Finder: Baseball should dry up
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Major League Baseball types, in their finite wisdom, decided this week not to institute a league-wide policy about alcohol's availability to their millionaire employees at work, in clubhouses and on charters.
The beer-league commissioner known as, um, Bud, prefers to entrust such verdicts to the individual clubs.
Leave it up to Selig's old Milwaukee team, the Brewers, who play in Miller Park. Leave it up to the Cardinals, who play in Busch Stadium. Leave it up to the Rockies, who play in Coors Field.
Well, the Cardinals had to react responsibly after the April 29 death of St. Louis reliever Josh Hancock, whose second overnight accident in three days proved fatal, this with twice the Missouri legal limit of alcohol in his bloodstream, a small amount of marijuana in his rented SUV and a cell phone to his ear when he crashed into a flatbed tow truck on U.S. Route 40.
At least the Rockies made a conscious, and good-conscience, decision. Little more than a week ago, they officially removed alcohol from both clubhouses in their Colorado ballpark and from their road clubhouse. Still, they're walking a line a few steps straighter than most major-league clubs.
In all, roughly 12 of the 32 teams ban alcohol from their home clubhouse, including the Pirates, who also prohibit it on their charter flights, but let their PNC Park visitors choose whether to stock or not. Only four teams ban it from both clubhouses: the Twins, the Athletics, the Yankees and the Nationals, with the last three making the move in the wake of the Hancock accident.
As for the rest of baseball, it's as if it never heard of Hancock or the litany of DUIs of late: St. Louis manager Tony La Russa, Florida's Dontrelle Willis, Toronto's Gustavo Chacin and Oakland's Esteban Loaiza, a former Pirates pitcher caught driving from McAfee Coliseum at 120 mph. It's as if all of professional sports want to turn a blind eye to the 100 drunken-driving arrests of NFL players alone since 2000. It's as if too many administrators refuse to learn the fateful lessons of Hancock, the Atlanta Thrashers' Dan Snyder, the Carolina Hurricanes' Steve Chiasson, the Philadelphia Flyers' Pelle Lindbergh, the Penguins' Baz Bastien, the New York Yankees' Billy Martin, the Cleveland Indians' Tim Crews and Steve Olin, the San Diego Padres' Mike Darr, all killed in alcohol-related accidents.
The Padres reacted, not after Darr's death, but after Hancock's, by limiting alcohol's availability in their home clubhouse and prohibiting players from drinking on the final two hours of charter flights, or flights shorter. The Indians of Olin and Crews, meantime, have a one-case-only rule in their clubhouse. Woo hoo.
When beer was removed from the Pirates' clubhouse in 2003, players privately complained to media. Then again, alcohol remains part of the team's road clubhouse. Remains part of the baseball and sports culture.
Time for last call at the ballpark and on the charter.
Baseball had a chance to make a public statement this week, and it whiffed. This is the league where ballparks cut off beer sales around the seventh inning. This is the league where Commish Bud, with rare, nearly universal support from the players' union, talks about striving for zero tolerance for performance-enhancing drugs but, apparently, 0.08 tolerance for blood-alcohol content is acceptable in its employees.
Here's a stat for baseball: Three Americans a year die from steroids, 17,000 from alcohol-related crashes.
If you're going to play games in Miller and Busch and Coors, if you're going to get into bed with brewery sponsorships to where most every television broadcast shows 200-plus subliminal ads, if you're going to posture about the integrity of the game but not about the integrity of a society that prohibits alcohol in most every other workplace, you should superficially try to keep your head above the foam.
Institute something better than beer-and-pretzel logic in all pro sports. Make every clubhouse, locker room and charter dry. Put the players on life's taxi squad: Mandate that they take a cab.
It might not only save a life, but also affect impressionable young fans. Athletes are better served as role models than roll-over models.
As St. Louis' Albert Pujols put it, "I think we should be examples." But, then, he's a nondrinker.
First Published May 19, 2007 11:03 pm
