America at Large: In an episode recounted in Christopher Lehmann-Haupt's book Me and DiMaggio, a group of us were clustered about the locker of the Pittsburgh Pirates reliever Kent Tekulve after a 1979 World Series game when our mutual friend, the late Jack McLain, leaned back against an adjacent locker and accidentally toppled an open can of beer off a shelf, writes George Kimball.
The can landed, face down, in one of Jim Bibby's loafers, into which it rapidly disgorged its gurgly contents. Bibby, a six-foot-five pitcher of the African-American persuasion, was in the shower when this happened, but McLain was mortified, not only over his carelessness, but at the prospect of how Bibby was going to react upon returning to discover the state of his Gucci.
While Jack tried to make himself inconspicuous, we attendant scribes immediately proclaimed him the winner of the Earl Butz Award. A few years earlier Butz had been forced to resign his position in Richard Nixon's cabinet for having told a "joke" in which he declared "loose shoes" to have been one of "the only three things the 'coloureds' are looking for." (The other two were equally unamusing, but unprintable.) It occurred to me this week that I spent something like 35 years interviewing naked baseball players who as often as not had a beer in their hands, but the post-game drink has suddenly become an endangered species.
For that matter, another American sporting ritual - the champagne-drenched orgy that accompanies a baseball team winning a pennant or a World Series - could also be headed the way of the spitball. Recent events have led five Major League teams to ban beer from their home-field clubhouses, joining seven others who had already done so, disrupting a tradition as old as the National Pastime itself.
Even during Prohibition, the New York Yankees used to keep two cases of beer on ice - one for Babe Ruth, the other for everybody else. One Triple Crown-winning hitter told me the secret of his success involved sneaking to the clubhouse between innings for a nip of Scotch.
"We used to have so much beer in the clubhouse that a lot of times guys would stuff three or four cans in a sanitary sock to take with them for the ride home," said Dennis Eckersley, a Hall of Fame pitcher in his day. "Just about the only time we didn't have booze around was when we won the 1989 World Series in Oakland.
That series had been delayed 10 days by the San Francisco earthquake, and the Athletics, thinking it might appear unseemly to be squirting champagne after an event in which so many lives had been lost, had voted in advance of their 4-0 sweep to forgo the tradition.
"Of course," said Eckersley, "it didn't matter to me." Eckersley was a recovering alcoholic who two years earlier had revived his career (and possibly saved his life) by checking into rehab. In other words, he knows whereof he speaks.
The current rash of reform was directly inspired by the death a few weeks ago of the St Louis pitcher Josh Hancock, who rammed a rented SUV into the rear of a tow truck at speed. It emerged Hancock was in a highly inebriated state and was driving a rental vehicle because he had wrecked his own a few nights earlier.
The logic, however, is somewhat skewed, because Hancock wasn't drinking at the ball park but at several saloons. A month earlier, on the other hand, the Cardinals' manager, Tony LaRussa, had been charged with driving under the influence after a training game, having passed out at the wheel of his car while stopped at a traffic light.
The Cardinals were the first of the recent teams to go dry, meaning beer is not available in the clubhouse of a team owned by a brewery and playing in Busch Stadium, which is named for a brewer. The team's official pronouncement and LaRussa's own statement cited the need to "set an example" for young people.
Several teams that no longer offer alcoholic beverages to their own players, however, continue to provide them for visiting teams, on the apparent grounds visiting players are less likely to be climbing behind the wheel of a car.
A few days ago the New York Timesdid a survey of the 30 major league teams. Thirteen continue to supply beer in both clubhouses. Another, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, provide post-game beer and wine to both. Four (Chicago White Sox, Cincinnati Reds, Kansas City Royals, Milwaukee Brewers) make beer only available for the home team, beer and liquor for visitors.
Eight teams (Baltimore Orioles, Chicago Cubs, Colorado Rockies, Florida Marlins, Houston Astros, Pittsburgh Pirates, New York Mets, and the Cardinals) now ban beer for the home team but supply it for the visitors, while four teams (Minnesota Twins, Oakland As, Washington Nationals and, as of last week, the New York Yankees) don't provide even beer to either.
The rash of reform has played out against a curious backdrop, given the long-standing cozy relationship between baseball and the beer industry. The Cardinals are owned lock, stock, and barrel by Budweiser. The Milwaukee Brewers play in a stadium called Miller Park, the Rockies at Coors Field. And while hardly anyone has bothered to point it out, Josh Hancock, whose death was the catalyst for this sudden rash of temperance, didn't get boozed up in the clubhouse but in downtown St Louis.
In other words, this is about more than morality, "setting a good example", or even some new awareness of the dangers of drunken driving. It has more to do with self-preservation.
"I'm not sorry to see it happening, but I don't believe for a second that these teams just woke up and decided to 'do the right thing'," said Dennis Eckersley. "What it's about is liability. If one of these guys gets behind the wheel and kills somebody, the first question that's going to be asked is, 'Well, where was he drinking?' And that's who's going to get sued."
