LETTERS: BASEBALL'S HABITS ARE A TURNOFF

To the editor:

As a child in the late 1940s and early 1950s, I sometimes would join my grandfather listening to St. Louis Cardinals baseball games over WKRO in Cairo before Harry Caray and August Busch parted company. As I grew up, I played Rotary League baseball in spite of being asthmatic at the time. Having outgrown my asthma by the time I reached school age, baseball was the only sport I went out for. I was never much good at the game, but that was not the point. I like baseball.

For come reason that I could not put my finger on, I started following baseball less and less, until the time came when I would not watch a game of baseball if there were anything else to watch or do. Having lived in Miami a few years, I have recently watched the National League championships and am now watching the World Series because of the participation of the Miami-based Florida Marlins. While watching the first game of the Series, I had an epiphany which explained why baseball and I had become estranged over the decades.

I was watching as the batsman was oscillating his bat as batsmen do in anticipation of the coming pitch. He spat on the third-base line not more than a foot from home plate. Think about it. When a runner is trying to score, he doesn't approach the plat with an eye to making it easy for the catcher to tax him out, does he? No, if he expects, from the posture of the catcher, that the play will be close, he doesn't run to the plate. He slides. And when he slides, he is not merely sliding through the dirt (that area on a baseball diamond is usually bare of grass). No, he is also sliding through anything that his fellow players happen to have left on the dirt, including saliva, tobacco juice and lung butter. The same thing applies to the handling of ground balls or, indeed, of anything placed on the ground or the dugout floor.

That train of thought was a total turnoff for me. Thereafter, I paid close attention to the expectorative activity of all the players to whom the cameras would cut. Within seconds of a player's becoming the object of the camera's view, my expectation of an expectoration was rewarded 90 percent of the time. My conclusion was that baseball is less a game than it is a highly publicized, well-remunerated opportunity to spread disease. And this aberrant behavior seems, in sports, unique to baseball. Even a free spirit like Dennis Rodman has not the nerve to spit, even once, on the basketball court. When this Series is over, I expect to become interested in a more mannerly, more genteel sport, say like mudwrestling.

DONN S. MILLER

Tamms, Ill.