Why Baseball Players Spit
by kev on November 6, 2007 

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A funny blog I like to read recently wrote a post asking why baseball players and coaches are always spitting. It’s a fair question, but a difficult one to answer. It’s like asking why a rugby team stranded in the snowy Andes mountains after a plane crash would resort to cannabolism in order to survive.

It’s something you have to be a part of to totally understand.

For full disclosure, I played baseball from the age of six to my freshman year of college. In my early twenties, I coached baseball for three years. During my time as a player and coach, spitting wasn’t just something I did - it was something I tried to perfect.

Why?

What a bystander or fan doesn’t understand is that spitting and winning go hand in hand. In baseball, you cannot have one without the other. Show me a team with players and coaches who do not spit every five seconds and I will show you a team of losers. If a team wants to win, it has to spit. A lot.

The good players - the really good players - work on their spitting during the off-season. Right beside their home gym and in-door batting cage is a spittoon. With their spittoons, players work on accuracy and distance. Players know that in order to step up their game to the next level, they must be able to accurately spit on clumps of dirt fifteen yards away. If they can’t, they will eventually be replaced by players who can.

Coaches also understand the importance of spitting in baseball. Why else would they be doing it all the time? It doesn’t look attractive. No woman has watched a baseball game, seen someone spitting on high-def television and thought to herself, “I’m going to marry that man.” No, they do it because it’s fundamental to the game. Whenever a coach is fired, teams often cite “we needed to go in another direction” as a primary reason.

In baseball, “we needed to go in another direction” is code for “his spitting just wasn’t up to snuff.”

Because it is so vital to a player’s success, coaches begin teaching the art of spitting to players at a very young age. Go to any Little League game and you will see kids as young as six spitting on the ground. They don’t do it because they like to do it. They do it because it’s one of the three fundamentals of baseball:

• Keep your eye on the ball.
• Always wear a cup.
• Spit all the time.

Oh sure, it can be argued that spitting in baseball can be traced back to the early days of the game when players and coaches all chewed tobacco. Spitting was just something you had to do with chewing tobacco, so people didn’t think anything of it. And so it became a part of the game. Players who didn’t chew tobacco spit because everyone else did it. In time, tobacco was predominantly replaced by something healthier that also required spitting: sunflower seeds. And so the spitting continued. Today, kids spit while playing baseball because they see the players on television do it. The players on television do it because they grew up watching players do it, or because they eat sunflower seeds or chew tobacco. And so on. In short, players and coaches spit because everyone else does it or did it.

Believe that nonsense if you want. The truth is: spitting is paramount to success in baseball. If you want to win, you have to spit. If you don’t want to spit, go have a tea party.

All that said, anyone who spits outside the game of baseball should be tarred and feathered. It’s a disgusting habit.