Chewing Tobacco In Professional Baseball

Chewing tobacco should be banned from professional baseball because it is an unhealthy addiction and leaves a negative impact on America’s youth. Chewing tobacco has been a part of the game for too long and has been causing problems since the beginning. It has been used throughout the game by players and managers alike; this widespread use has been a negative influence to the younger generation in America. Seeing their heroes (professional athletes), chewing, has caused kids to follow in their footsteps and take up the nasty habit as well. Once you start chewing, it is highly addictive and extremely hard to break once you have started. Chewing tobacco has been in baseball long enough. With all of the negative health consequences and the impact it has had on people, chewing tobacco should be …show more content…
Many players have had some degree of oral cancer. Roger Clemens (great pitcher in the late 1990s, early 2000s), has been battling mouth cancer for years now, due to his tobacco use. Some players have even passed away from it. Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn passed away in 2014 from salivary gland cancer. Major League Baseball made an effort to ban smokeless tobacco in baseball in 2011, but players and organizations shot down that proposal to keep alive the tradition of chewing tobacco in baseball. Tobacco in baseball is everywhere. Even in baseball movies, there are scenes where players have huge wads of tobacco stuffed into their cheeks. All of this publicity that chewing tobacco is receiving on television, in movies and in baseball games, can really mess with any young adult who might view chewing tobacco as wrong. If a young person viewed chewing tobacco as a bad thing, and saw an actor or a baseball player chewing, they might want to start. All of the positive publicity chewing tobacco receives needs to come to an end before more and more people, especially children, are