AS I SEE IT COLUMN: Why do baseball players spit so much?

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/07/2023 (663 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If one were to rank the grossest activity in all of sport, it is hard to think of something more repulsive or more disgusting than the sight of baseball players spitting all the time.

I have no empirical stats to back this up but the floor of a major league baseball team’s dugout has to be the most unhealthy, bacteria-filled surface in the entire sporting world.

A brief search online describes the need to spit as the result excessive movement during a sport that causes the body to produce high levels of protein. That thicker protein makes saliva thicker and harder to swallow, thus creating the need or desire to spit.

That makes scientific sense, but it doesn’t make any sense in the context of baseball. Players in a baseball game almost never undergo excessive movement. They stand around most of the time when playing defense, and when their team is batting, nearly the whole team is sitting on the bench.

Given what we know about how the body produces more saliva when an athlete is working hard, professional basketball players should be spitting all over the floor at NBA games. Yet somehow they don’t spit.

Hockey players work incredibly hard over short periods of time, and they do spit, but they typically spit onto the ice and not onto the floor by their bench.

You don’t see volleyball players or tennis players spitting on the court. How are they able to control their saliva when they work significantly harder than baseball players?

So it’s clear the cause for all that disgusting spitting isn’t scientific, it’s cultural. Baseball players have for generations used chewing tobacco, which generated excessive spitting. In recent years players have moved away from chewing tobacco and moved toward to bubble gum and sunflower seeds.

(Space doesn’t allow for it here but an entire column could be written about the terrible role models baseball players are to young kids who want to copy what the pros are doing, given the very real threat of mouth cancer from chewing tobacco.)

Once science confirmed that COVID could be transmitted through spit – sorry anti-vaxxers; in the real world pesky things like science, evidence and expert advice all matter — Major League Baseball banned spitting outright in light of the danger of spreading infectious and highly contagious diseases.

And somehow, baseball players were able to keep their spit in the mouth.

Putting health concerns aside for a moment, from a purely aesthetic point of view, all the spitting in baseball is beyond revolting. Baseball officials have imposed several new rules to speed up the game and they have proven, somewhat surprisingly, to be effective. Baseball games finish up about 30 minutes sooner than in past years.

If Major League Baseball wants to improve baseball’s image and attract more fans, banning spitting would go a long way.

Baseball players like to spit, but they don’t have to. It’s kind of like fighting in hockey. Given the archaic knuckle-dragging eye-for-eye mentality in the NHL, we see fights and all manner of after-the-whistle skirmishes (especially in the playoffs). We’re told it’s “part of the culture of the game.”

Hogwash.

When those exact same players play in the Olympics or World Championships, suddenly the old-fashioned need to fight evaporates into thin air. Those same players learn to not fight.

The same applies to baseball. Culturally, spitting has been a part of the game for generations. But as the spitting ban during COVID proved, players can learn not to spit.

It’s time for baseball to ban spitting, permanently.