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Despite controversy, Little Leaguers still crave shredded gum from a pouch

BY DAN SIMMONS

CHICAGO -- Thomas Nugent, a shortstop on Wilmette, Ill.'s 11-year-old Bronco traveling team, figures he goes through a pouch a week of shredded gum. He likes the taste and can blow big-league-sized bubbles without losing focus -- with one exception.

"I don't blow bubbles when I'm batting," he said. "It's kind of distracting."

As Nugent and his green-shirted teammates practiced before a game against Northbrook Green at Roemer Park in Wilmette, each had a pouch jammed in his back pocket. Cheeks bulged. Pink, purple and green bubbles popped.

The Big League Chew brand is celebrating its 30th summer in many of the nation's bullpens, dugouts and outfields. But even as it has made money for Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co. and the two minor-leaguers who invented it, the gum also has generated controversy because of the association with chewing tobacco.

Kevin Carpenter, 31, runs the concession stand at Roemer Park, where the two teams were about to play an afternoon game. The gum, he says, is a fixture there.

"It's become one of those staples of Little League baseball," he said.

Behind the product and its success is the story of two bored minor-leaguers who cooked up an idea one night during a game. They thought shredded gum would be a good alternative to chewing tobacco, but had no idea it would go beyond their bullpen chatter.

"It was like catching a 40-pound tuna our first day fishing," said Jim Bouton, a south suburban Bloom Township High School alum who was in that bullpen during a comeback attempt. He had already gained fame as a New York Yankees pitcher and author of the controversial baseball memoir "Ball Four" in 1970.

Rob Nelson, a pitcher who came up with the name, never made it past single-A ball, but certainly belongs in the hall-of-fame for chewing gum.

Growing up in the 1950s in Long Island, he recalled how he chewed gum by the mouthful, inspired by the big plug of tobacco that filled the cheeks of his hero, White Sox second baseman Nellie Fox.

"I wanted to look like him," Nelson said, "so I always had a ton of bubblegum in my mouth."

That childhood obsession led to the idea for a shredded bubble gum for players to chew instead of tobacco, which he called "disgusting." So during that night game in 1977, he shared his idea with Bouton as they sat in the bullpen. Bouton said he was immediately taken with it.

"I offered to go partners with him, so we hired a lawyer, made up some samples by frying gum in the batboy's kitchen, cut it with a scissors, bought chewing tobacco pouches, put the gum inside, put my picture on the pouch and called it Big League Chew," Bouton said.

In the years since, the gum and its association with tobacco has come in for some criticism.

"With Big League Chew, you get all the sensory cues you have with using chewing tobacco except the nicotine," said Gregory Connolly, a Harvard public-health professor who studies tobacco use in baseball.

"In my opinion, that's the natural next step. Why settle for sugar when you can have nicotine?"

Research has shown that, in the case of smoking, children who buy candy or bubble gum cigarettes are much more likely to smoke real ones later than children who don't purchase the lookalikes.

Nelson called the comparisons misguided, saying the gum is no more a gateway to chewing tobacco than Nerf guns are to AK-47s. He pointed out that the gum originated as, and remains, an alternative to the hard stuff.

Both he and Bouton, he said, became disgusted by their Portland Mavericks teammates spitting tobacco juice on each other's white cleats as a prank. That kind of horseplay fit with baseball's long association with tobacco. Major League Baseball banned all tobacco use from its minor league system in 1993.

Long before, Nelson and Bouton wanted to set a different tone.

"The message we're trying to send is that smart ballplayers chew bubblegum," Nelson said.

Baseball is ideal for gum chewing, with "so much dead time," he said.

As balls popped into gloves and bubbles burst at Roemer Park, a soft breeze cut against the sticky air of a July afternoon, rippling the American flag near the scoreboard.

Northbrook's Jackson Grabill recalled that he got his first pouch of Big League Chew the same day he got his first baseball mitt. These days, he rarely leaves home without his glove -- and his gum.

Teammate Jake Deutsch, 11, prefers the grape flavor. With the game about to begin, he figured his favorite chew would help him get through the tough spots.

"It sort of takes the stress off when we're in a high-intensity game," he said.