#164 Spit tune

So I’m watched more baseball than normal this season and I couldn’t help but notice that what used to be an occasional counterpoint to the lack of action had blossomed into a full blown institution in its own right. I’m talking about spitting. What is it about baseball and spitting? And I not just talking chaw-spitting. The AMA and public decency have pretty well banned that obnoxious habit from the airwaves. And I’d be willing to bet, judging from the beautiful greens at every field I’ve seen on TV, that the baseball groundskeepers unions had something to do with eliminating the spittoonarage as we. No yelly tobaccy patches anywhere that I could see.
No, I’m just talking regular spitting. And not even good spitting either, half the players and coaches I saw just kind of sprayed spittle and sputtered sputum out of their mouths like involuntary Bronx cheers or Danny Thomas spit takes—a total, mouth-emptying experience. It wasn’t a finely directed squirt of quid into a selected target, that kind of a designated spitter type of deal you used to see in the thirties. Forget about steroids, in the old days players knew how to spit.
Funny thing is, you don’t see all that spitting in other sports. Granted, it would be hard to pull off in basketball. You’d need lots of buckets. Cause one little wet spot on a basketball court is slick as, well, spit, and multi-million dollar players getting multi-million dollar injuries because one player slips in another’s lip dribbles is not gonna work. Football, while it’s outdoorsy enough to handle a little pucker precipitation, has another problem: helmet backsplash. Nothing curtails the urge to purge like the prospect of it bouncing right back in your eye.
Funny thing; I play racquetball. And me and all the guys I play with never seem to develop the urge to spit. We sweat, we grunt, we breathe hard, and generally work our heinies off. But none of us spits. If anything, we try to keep the fluid in cause we’re sweating so much of it out. Maybe that’s the difference. Maybe we don’t need to spit because we’re exercising. And not just standing around on the lawn.
Then again, we’re inside and we don’t have to catch, or hit, any long balls. Could be these baseball players are just using an old time mariner technique. They’re using their spit to gauge windage. Like a naval artillery gunner they’re spitting into the wind to help them measure the trajectory of that big shot. Except instead of hitting the enemy’s ship, they’re about to fire it into the left field bleachers.
A fine nautical tradition. As I’m sure is crotch-grabbing.
America ya gotta love it.