Baseball and alcohol seem to go hand in hand, but Major League Baseball is making attempts to dial down this association. The Texas Rangers have twice doused their most valuable player contender Josh Hamilton with soft drinks instead of Champagne as an acknowledgment of Hamilton’s sobriety after years of drug and alcohol abuse, and it looks like soda will be replacing Champagne in all of these celebrations.
In its latest attempt, the league recently issued new guidelines to teams: Teams must limit Champagne during the Champagne celebration, offer a non-alcoholic option, and can no longer bring alcoholic drinks on the field. Rob Manfred, the MLB’s executive vice president, said that there have been concerns that these celebrations can get out of hand, and that the league periodically revisits the issue.
In the 19th century, the National League (now called the American League) was known as the “beer and whiskey league.” Tim Arango of the New York Times writes that Dr. Bobby Brown, who played with the Yankees in the 1940s and 1950s, tried to persuade teams to use ginger ale instead of Champagne when he was the president of the American League in the 1980s and 1990s. He told the New York Times that it’s very hard to change things in sports.
In 1999, the Yankees celebrated with non-alcoholic Champagne out of respect for their teammate Darryl Strawberry, who was recovering from alcoholism. However, last year the Angels doused the jersey of their teammate Nick Adenhart, who was killed earlier in the season by a drunk driver, with beer. And Willy Aybar, who has been through alcohol rehabilitation, was sprayed with alcohol by his Tampa Bay Rays teammates after they earned a spot in the playoffs earlier this year.
About half of baseball’s 30 clubs ban alcohol in clubhouses, stemming from a crackdown on alcohol after the 2007 drunk-driving death of Josh Hancock, a pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals. Those teams include the New York Yankees, the New York Mets, the St. Louis Cardinals, the Minnesota Twins, the Oakland Athletics, and the Washington Nationals.
Source: New York Times, Tim Arango, Champagne Ritual, Made a Little Less Intoxicating, October 30, 2010
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