Controlling people’s lives one chew at a time.
Via Deadspin:
As part of baseball’s new Collective Bargaining Agreement, which was finalized late Wednesday night, MLB and the MLBPA agreed to a ban on smokeless tobacco for new major leaguers going forward, according to the Associated Press. City-specific bans already apply to ballparks in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Milwaukee, and D.C.
Advocacy groups have been working for years to cut down on the ambient affiliation between baseball and tobacco, with limited success. The cause received an unfortunate boost in 2014 when Tony Gwynn died of cancer at the age of 54. His family contends that his decades-long chewing tobacco habit directly contributed to his untimely death, and earlier this year they brought a negligence and product liability lawsuit against Altria Group Inc., formerly the Philip Morris company, one of the largest tobacco companies in the world.