Word: alcoholism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and alcohol. Home runs, strip joints, barroom brawls and Billy Martin. It seems the drug cloud of the past two or three seasons has finally lifted, and the grand old game is itself again, in stitches over another Martin episode, 40 stitches this time, around the left ear. A recounting of his baseball career is more than just a primer for an emergency room. It's an argument for wholesome depravity...
During spring training, Commissioner Peter Ueberroth quietly tried to talk to Martin about his drinking. But alcohol and baseball have always had a charmed association. Beer is practically a synonym for the sport. Hockey scrapes Drunken Driver Pelle Lindbergh off the highway, while basketball and football shake their heads at Chris Mullin and Tommy Kramer. But baseball literally cheers for hangovers. In Mel Allen's day at the Yankee mike, home runs were "Ballantine blasts." Now the St. Louis Cardinals do their rallying to the Budweiser jingle played incessantly on the Busch Stadium organ...
...Newcombe, the old Brooklyn pitcher, estimates, "On the championship team of '55, I guess the Dodgers had seven or eight abusive drinkers, including me. In society, we don't take alcohol too seriously. In sports, we laugh at it. It's all one big Lite-beer commercial." He's an alcohol counselor now, and the counselors have a pretty good pitching rotation. "I never really knew what it was like to pitch a sober inning," says Ryne Duren, the Yankee reliever of the early '60s. "When I was with the Yankees in the mid-'70s," says Sudden Sam McDowell, "they...
...managed -- not including the ones who had to take time to dry out, like the young pitcher Bob Welch. Interestingly, Newcombe had approved of Lasorda's office tap. "It kept the players from grabbing six packs to go," he says. "Now I wish the Dodgers would stop selling alcohol in the stands after the fifth inning...
...Dallas commands $150 on the street in New York City. With such profits at stake, it is no wonder that Texas, already a major corridor for narcotics from Central America, is turning into a principal source of guns for drug gangs around the U.S. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms figures that Texas trails only Florida as a black-market weapons supplier. Lax firearms laws require no waiting period or investigation of a buyer; gun smugglers send ordinary-looking shoppers, often women, from gun shop to gun shop, acquiring a weapon at each stop. Within...