Chewing tobacco losing its bite in baseball dugouts
7/9/2006 Pittsburgh, PA Lee Bowman ScrippsNews (www.scrippsnews.com) The Pittsburgh Pirates' dugout at PNC Park, site of Tuesday's All-Star game, is less likely to be tobacco-stained than was their lair in old Three Rivers Stadium when the Midsummer Classic was last played there 12 years ago. A newly published study_ based on 10 years of surveys and looking into the mouths of professional baseball players at Pirates spring training camps _ finds that smokeless-tobacco use among members of the club's major and minor league teams declined by more than a third between 1990 and 2000. Dipping and chewing goes way back with baseball. Many think the urge to chew and spit is a way to expend nervous energy between the next at-bat or the next play in the field, whether the chew is sunflower seeds, bubble gum or wads of tobacco. "A lot of players say they only use tobacco during the season or cut way down in the off-season. It's very much part of the cultural aspect of baseball," said Dr. Keith Sinusas, lead author of the study published in the July issue of Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise. The difference, says Sinusas, is that tobacco users are much more likely to have one or more lesions or patches in or around the mouth that can progress to oral cancer. Since 1986, the U.S. Surgeon General has warned of a clear association between smokeless tobacco use and oral cancers. Sinusas and former Pirates team physician Dr. Joseph Coroso [...]