Not Worth A Spit Pitcher’s Struggle Emphasizes Baseball’s War Against Use Of Smokeless Tobacco

Mets pitcher Pete Harnisch couldn’t sleep the night before his opening-day start, apparently suffering the effects of a battle tougher than any game. He had used smokeless tobacco for years but decided during spring training to quit.

His condition was so bad that he almost sat out the game. But after using a small bit of tobacco, he pitched five scoreless innings - then gave up three consecutive homers in the Mets’ loss.

Now Harnisch is on the 15-day disabled list while his friends and critics of smokeless tobacco rally around him.

“It’s physically the hardest thing I’ve had to do in my life,” said Phillies pitcher Curt Schilling, a friend of Harnisch who is on his third attempt to quit using snuff. “I’ve heard people talk about drug addiction. And to me, this has every sign.”

This is not Harnisch’s first attempt to kick a habit that can lead to cancer. “We’d always talk about it. One of us would say, ‘I’m done.’ Two days later, he’d be dipping again,” Schilling said.

Another friend of Harnisch, Astros first baseman Jeff Bagwell, said trying to give up tobacco might be just one of several problems for the Mets’ pitcher.

“I talked to him before the season started about his baseball game, and he wasn’t real happy about that,” he said.

But Harnisch is tough, Bagwell added: “He’ll overcome this.”

Bagwell himself gave up smokeless tobacco in 1993. He suffered through two or three weeks of nervousness and shakiness, but it didn’t affect his play, he said.

Chewing tobacco or dipping snuff - when a pinch of tobacco is placed between the gum and lower lip - can be seductive, said Dr. Neal Benowitz, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

The total nicotine dose in smokeless tobacco builds gradually over 20 to 30 minutes and can be up to four times greater than the dose cigarettes supply, he said.

Cigarettes, on the other hand, are gone in minutes and deliver their hit of nicotine quickly.

Another difference is that smokeless tobacco doesn’t choke red blood cells with oxygen-robbing carbon monoxide, so it won’t reduce an athlete’s aerobic endurance, Benowitz said.

While nicotine might offer users a heightened ability to concentrate, it certainly doesn’t improve talent, said former major league outfielder Bill Tuttle, whose cheeks use to bulge with chewing tobacco in the ‘50s.

“It doesn’t make you a 20-game winner,” Tuttle said, and players who chew and bat .200 will find “it doesn’t make you a .300 hitter.”

Tuttle’s face is badly disfigured: He lost his jawbone and teeth in a series of cancer operations he blames on tobacco. He’s in remission but still craves tobacco.

“If the doctor told me I would never get cancer again, I would start chewing tomorrow,” Tuttle said. “That’s how much I miss it.”

Trying to break that dependence is where withdrawal symptoms start. And for an athlete, they can be devastating. “They can’t concentrate, they can’t focus; they become irritable, restless,” Benowitz said.

Schilling recalls his last two attempts to quit using snuff ended after two weeks because he became violently ill for 24 hours. “I was throwing up,” he said. “It was unbelievable.”

Those attempts were made cold turkey. Schilling thinks he might do better this time on nicotine patches with diminishing doses aimed at weaning him off dependency.

The alternative to quitting for some could be cancer - and a slow death.

Tuttle makes that point when he visits major and minor league teams as part of the National Spit Tobacco Education Program headed by former major league catcher Joe Garagiola. The program is trying to break the historical link between baseball and smokeless tobacco.

Tobacco companies capitalize on that link because it makes “spit” tobacco look macho to young people, Garagiola said. It’s not macho, he said: “It’s a gross habit.”

Those who don’t quit for themselves should think of their families, said Tuttle’s wife Gloria, who also speaks on the tours for the tobacco education program.

“I tell them about watching my husband feed himself through tubes, watching my husband cry when he thought no one was looking, because of the pain,” she said. “I tell them about having to walk into the recovery room not knowing what he would look like.

“My husband is feeling pretty good now,” she said. “But the life he is living is not a pretty one.”

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: NO SNUFF, NO SLEEP Pete Harnisch isn’t talking publicly about his struggle. Team officials say he is suffering from insomnia, and they link it to his attempt to give up using smokeless tobacco.