Baseball's curse
Smokeless tobacco has been side by side with baseball from the beginning, and it has claimed the lives of some of the games most celebrated players. In baseball's early days, players used it to keep their mouths wet on the dry, dusty field during long games, and they used the spit to help soften their gloves. However, in their day, they didn't know of smokeless tobacco's dangers as we do today. Many American baseball films strengthen the stereotype by depicting the habit. Tom Hanks spits out a mouthful in A League of Their Own, and the young players from The Sandlot Kids urge each other to dip because "all the pros do it." (Tawkfik, 2015).