Curt Schilling wrote an open letter to himself on a site called “The Players’ Tribune” about the dangers of chewing tobacco.
Curt Schilling as you know, was a longtime chewer who last year developed oral cancer. After months of chemo and radiation, he is cancer-free and is now a big anti-chew advocate.
Schilling isn’t my favourite player out there. He’s a bit of a blowhard, I don’t like his politics and I don’t have a lot of patience for athletes who feel the need to rub their faith in people’s noses, but when it comes to the issue of chewing tobacco, he’s on the right side.
A lot of his letter gets preachy — I’ll skip over that — but he says some great things about chew in his piece:
Tomorrow at lunch, a kid is going to dare you to take a dip of Copenhagen. If you say yes, like I did, you’ll be addicted for the rest of your life. Well, the rest of your life up to the point when you are diagnosed with cancer.
I get what you’re thinking. You’re 16 — you’re invincible, just like all your buddies. If you were to jump ahead 33 years, you couldn’t write a better dream than the one your life is going to be.
With one exception.
If you say yes tomorrow, you will become addicted to chewing tobacco and you will get mouth cancer.
OK, there is a long preachy part, I get the point that Schilling is trying to make, but it’s really preachy. Anyway, then Schilling returns to his chew use:
You will develop sores, you will lose your sense of taste and smell. You will develop lesions. You will lose your gums — they will rot. You will have problems with your teeth for the rest of your life.
You will meet men — many good, honest men — who chewed. None of them will have their entire face. They will be missing jaws, chins, cheeks, noses and more. None will live more than a year or two after you meet them. All of them were tobacco chewers.
You will meet Joe Garigiola. He will introduce you to Bill Tuttle. Bill will have no lower face. His entire lower jaw is gone. It was that, or die of mouth cancer. Well, not “that or,” because that mouth cancer would kill him inside of two years.
You will brush your teeth and your mouth will bleed. Not light blood from your gums, but darker blood from deeper inside your mouth. That’s the chew destroying your tissue. You will get message after message, but your addiction will always win, until it wins the biggest battle.
You will get message after message, but your addiction will always win, until it wins the biggest battle
If you say yes tomorrow, you will begin to kill yourself from the inside out. It’s difficult for you to understand in this current phase of your life, but by chewing tobacco, you are jeopardizing your participation in what will be some of your most important moments.
You will risk any chance of seeing your four amazing children graduate high school. You will potentially lose the opportunity to walk your daughter Gabriella (who, like her dad, will be blessed with simple yet outstanding pitching mechanics) down the aisle. You will risk not seeing Gehrig, your oldest son, pitch for four years at a New England college. You may miss your son Grant graduating high school and changing the world. And you may be absent as your youngest son Garrison — who aspires to follow in your father’s footsteps and join the army — masterfully plays goalie with a remarkable passion.
…
Your dad is going to die in five years. You know what’s going to kill him? A heart attack brought on by heart disease and lung cancer caused by tobacco use. He’ll die right in front of you.
Finally, consider this: How many kids will start dipping over the next 32 years because they saw you do it?
Do you want that on you? No?
Then my advice is simple. Tomorrow, at lunch, just say no.
Radon is behind tobacco the No. 2 environmental factor in causing lung cancer. It’s estimated that radon in homes results in 15,000 to 22,000 deaths a year in the U.S.
A disturbing new study from Johns Hopkins University found that radon concentrations in Pennsylvania homes near fracking areas have radon concentrations 39 percent higher than those in non-fracking areas. Great. With all the other negative effects of fracking, ruining people’s wells and water supplies, etc., it also releases a cancer-causing element.
The study, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, took more than 2 million radon readings between 1987 and 2013 in 860,000 buildings. Wow, seriously extensive.
The study did not find a direct link between the fracking and radon releases, but it’s a pretty easy conclusion that that link exists — 39 percent increase in radon is eyebrow-raising.
We’ve turned a big corner in lung cancer in the U.S. The lung cancer death rate among men have been dropping steadily for 30 years and the death rate for women started to drop (albeit more slowly) about 15 years ago — mostly because far fewer people are smoking obviously. We don’t need more fracking to put a dent in that trend.
I wrote about this a few weeks ago, but here is another article on the same subject from USA Today — the fear that Big Tobacco will take over the legal marijuana business.
Most legal marijuana businesses in Colorado, Washington and Oregon are small mom-and-pop operations. And they are heavily regulated as states are being careful how legal pot is being sold and distributed.
However, it’s already obvious that it must be terribly tempting for Big Tobacco to jump into the burgeoning multi-billion-dollar industry. Its current product — tobacco — is seeing diminishing revenues, at least in the West, thanks to higher taxes, drastically lower smoking rates (from close to 30 percent about 20 years ago to about 18 percent today), the popularity of e-cigs, smoking bans and lots of other factors.
Hah, OK, this quote from the USA Today article cracked me up:
“I think there’s a ton of paranoia that they’re buying up warehouses and signing secret deals,” said Chris Walsh, the editor of Marijuana Business Daily, an industry publication.
However, noted anti-smoking crusader Stanton Glantz recently co-authored a paper that the tobacco industry has had an interest in the marijuana market since the 1970s. And USA Today was nice enough to provide a link to the paper.
According to the paper, published in Milbank Quarterly:
“In many ways, the marijuana market of 2014 resembles the tobacco market before 1880, before cigarettes were mass produced using mechanization and marketed using national brands and modern mass media. Legalizing marijuana opens the market to major corporations, including tobacco companies, which have the financial resources, product design technology to optimize puff-by-puff delivery of a psychoactive drug (nicotine), marketing muscle, and political clout to transform the marijuana market.”
Both Altria and RJ Reynolds deny they are looking to get involved in the marijuana business, but we we know the tobacco industry’s track record for honesty, right? Hah! ——>
The head of a company that makes hydroponic equipment for marijuana growing agrees that it appears inevitable that Big Tobacco, and possibly the alcohol industry, will try to muscle in on marijuana as more states legalize it.
“We’re a mass-produced society, from the food we eat to the television we watch,” said President and CEO Derek Peterson of Terra Tech, “ultimately, big alcohol or big tobacco is going to come into this space. I just can’t imagine that won’t happen.”
And with the tobacco industry’s involvement, look for many of the same tricks tobacco used to market cigarettes to kids to market marijuana to underaged users. (Yeah, I know, like marijuana really needs to be marketed to teenagers, but you get my drift. E-cig companies have been incredibly — and I mean incredibly — brazen in marketing e-cigs to kids, look for Joe “Rasta” Camel to make a comeback if Big Tobacco gets involved in pot.).
You don’t hear much about smoking bans anymore. Pretty much everywhere that’s going to pass smoking bans has already done it by now.
Austria has apparently been lagging behind the rest of Western Europe. However, it will soon become the latest country to ban smoking in cafes and restaurants.
Austria joins Spain, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Italy, all of Scandinavia, Hungary, France, the Netherlands and all of the Baltic states in having a nationwide indoor smoking ban. Most of the European countries that don’t have smoking bans are in Eastern Europe, where smoking rates are incredibly high.
The Austrian Chamber of Commerce announced it plans to appeal the ban, which won’t go into effect until 2018. Cafe owners who implement the ban in 2016 will receive compensation from the Austrian government to make up for possible losses in revenues.
A far-right party called the Freedom Party, said it would get rid of the law if it wins parliamentary elections. (Nothing sends a chill down the spine quite like “far right” and “Austria” in the same sentence.)
In case you didn’t need any more reasons to quit smoking. A study from the University of California, San Diego suggests that cigarette smoke makes that nasty and stubborn MRSA bacteria tougher to kill through a variety of means. (And trust me, it really sucked to look at some of the pictures when I went looking for MRSA images. Yuck… I didn’t need to see that before dinner.)
This is kind of technical, so I am just going to quote from the article rather than try to explain it myself:
“We already know that smoking cigarettes harms human respiratory and immune cells, and now we’ve shown that, on the flipside, smoke can also stress out invasive bacteria and make them more aggressive,” said Dr. Laura E. Crotty Alexander of UC San Diego and the Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System.
Macrophages, or immune cells known to devour infectious ages, were infected with both types of MRSA (smoke exposed and not) to test the immune response. Although both were able to take up the populations of MRSA, macrophages fighting MRSA exposed to cigarette smoke extract had a significantly harder time killing them.
Researchers found that this type of MRSA was more resistant to the reactive oxygen species, a chemical burst macrophages utilize once they have engulfed bacteria. MRSA exposed to smoke extract was also more resistant to antimicrobial peptides, another line of immune defense used to make holes in bacteria and cause inflammation. Even more alarming was researchers’ discovery that MRSA was able to adhere better to human cells when treated with smoke, assisting in the success of their invasion. This effect depended strongly on dose; the more smoke extract the MRSA was exposed to, the more resistant it became.
Get this, not only does cigarette smoke have this effect … so do e-cigs. From the article:
Another study conducted by researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine a year earlier suggested something similar with e-cigarette smoke; vaporized smoke can also alter the structure of MRSA’s cell wall to make it more resistant to bacteria. However, this research also discovered that surface changes to the bacteria increased 10 times more with exposure to cigarette smoke rather than e-cigarette vapor.
A study recently released out of Finland suggests that secondhand smoke not only damages lung health around kids, it damages their circulatory system to the point of raising the risk of heart disease when they are adults.
What researchers found in this 20-year study is that kids exposed to nicotine from their parents’ smoking tend to have an added build-up of carotid plaque in their blood vessels as adults — the kind of plaque that causes heart disease.
Just more fuel to the fire about the damage down by secondhand smoke, especially to kids. Secondhand smoke has been shown to cause and worsen lung and bronchial infections, aggravate asthma, cause ear infections among children and even increase the risk of sudden-death syndrome. There are still people claiming secondhand smoke doesn’t kill or even harm anyone (Libertarian stooge John Stossel comes to mind), but those voices have grown more and more quiet over the past 10 years since I’ve been involved in the tobacco control debate. They were pretty loud ten years ago, but nobody listens to them anymore, just like most everyone stopped listening 30 years ago to those people still trying to claim smoking didn’t give smokers lung cancer.
Heart disease and blood vessel plaque buildup … you can add to the afflictions caused by secondhand smoke.
I once did a little math exercise that really scared me. You’re going to find this number hard to believe, but bare with me … it is a shocking number.
I estimate that for the first 16 years of my life, my parents smoked between them roughly five to six packs a day. To be conservative, let’s call that 100 cigarettes a day. Say, I was exposed to their smoking for 8 hours of the day — one-third of that 100 — that’s 33 cigarettes a day. Say, I actually ingested 10 percent of their smoke into my lungs — that’s 3.3 cigarettes a day.
That’s 3.3 cigarettes a day, 365 days a year, for 16+ years. That comes out to the equivalent of roughly 20,000 cigarettes. So I estimate that just from my parents alone, not counting my brother and sister who smoked, not counting all of my parents’ friends who smoked — and they pretty much all did — I breathed in the equivalent smoke of 20,000 cigarettes from the time I was a baby in a crib to until I was 16. My dad died when I was 16, so that number probably dropped off afterward. 20,000 cigarettes in my still developing lungs. No wonder I had such bad bronchitis as a teenager, no wonder I had chronic problems with bronchitis until I turned 30.
And now it makes me wonder whether it’s going to catch up with me with heart disease. I’ve already had one circulatory system scare.
I’m not bitter or angry at my parents about it and I hope I don’t come off like a whiner — it’s just that that 20,000 figure continues to blow me away. They didn’t know (though, without trying to sound bitter about it, I will always wonder why the thought never seemed to cross their minds that all that smoke might not be good for their kids. My mom loves to tell a story about how they had to leave Canada because it was so cold and her husband and my brother had pneumonia because of the cold. Cold weather doesn’t cause pneumonia. I have to bite my tongue every time she tells that story, because I want to say to her, “Mom, it wasn’t the cold weather that was giving dad and the kids pneumonia, it was probably the cigarettes more than anything …” But, to keep the peace, I never come out and say that.)
Anyway, most smokers know better today. I wish 100 percent of smokers knew better, but I still shake my head at the nitwits who in this day and age still smoke around kids. I bend over backward not to pass judgement on smokers, except when I see people smoking in a car with kids or otherwise blowing smoke in kids’ faces. Then I have a hard time not glaring.
Having read a lot of discussions lately about Gil Hodges, the baseball Hall of Fame and what makes a Hall of Famer, it got me thinking: “How many current players are Hall of Famer?”
I came up with my own list and I broke it down into five categories: No-Brainer Hall of Famers, Likely Hall of Famers, Off to a Good Start for the Hall of Fame, They Have a Shot at the Hall of Fame … and the fifth category is … David Ortiz. I came up with two “No-Brainers,” four “Likely Hall of Famers” and a whole slew of “Too Early to Tell, but Off to a Good Start” and “They Have a Shot” Hall of Famers. Ortiz is a unique situation that I’ll explain.
Albert Pujols
Hall of Fame discussions fascinate me. There are obviously easy picks for the Hall of Fame — guys like Randy Johnson and next year Ken Griffey Jr. are slam dunks, then there are the guys that are a bit borderline, guys like Craig Biggio or Barry Larkin. They’re the ones who create interesting debate. One thing that cracks me up in a Facebook discussion group are people who get sincerely angry over what they see as “unworthy” people in the Hall of Fame — somehow thinking that guys like Biggio and Larkin or Don Sutton somehow “disgrace” or water down “real Hall of Famers” like Babe Ruth and Henry Aaron and Lou Gehrig. I honestly don’t understand that view. I truly don’t. I feel like there’s bigger things in the world to be angry about — like great players like Dick Allen or Gil Hodges who for whatever mystifying reason simply cannot get in the Hall … or global warming … or Citizens United. Those are things worth getting angry about. I think there are probably some unworthy guys in the Hall, mostly old-timers put in via the Veterans Committee back in the day when the committee was beset by too much cronyism.
Clayton Kershaw
There are more than 17,000 men who have ever played Major League Baseball, and a whopping 215 of them are in the Hall of Fame as players. That’s 1.2 percent. That’s one player out of 80 who has ever played. That means 98.8 percent of the guys who have ever played in the entire history of baseball are not Hall of Famers. I don’t think it somehow detracts from Babe Ruth or Henry Aaron’s accomplishments if that number is 1.3 or 1.4 percent. They’re all the elite of the elite no matter what.
Anyway, here is my list of current players. Tell me what you think.
No-Brainer Hall of Famers
Albert Pujols
Already has 500 home runs, has won a Rookie of the Year award, three MVPs and a .317 lifetime hitter. He’s a first-ballot lock. His numbers have dropped off in recent years, but he should still make it to 3,000 hits. He is at 2,500 hits and is still only 35. He should also crack 600 home runs.
Ichiro
Ichiro
Simply the best Japanese player ever. He is 41 and is sitting at 2,844 hits, so he may not make 3,000. I don’t think he needs to get 3,000 hits to make the Hall of Fame. If you include his Japan League numbers, he actually has more than 4,000 hits. In one 10-year stretch, he averaged an incredible 224 hits a year. And he has stolen nearly 500 bases and has an MVP and Rookie of the Year award and 10 Gold Gloves — add to that a .317 lifetime average. I’m a little critical of his low OPS (.771), but that won’t hurt his HOF vote.
Likely Hall of Famers
Clayton Kershaw
Really, I probably could have put him in the No-Brainer category, but he simply hasn’t played enough years yet. He already has three Cy Young awards. He is 98-49 for his career and incredibly is still only 27 and has only pitched seven years. He could win 150 games before the age of 30. He has also struck out over 200 batters five times.
Miguel Cabrera
A rare triple crown winner, three-time batting champ, has won two MVP awards, .320 lifetime hitter, led the league in home runs twice, 390 home runs and 2,186 hits and he is still only 32. Barring major injuries, he should easily reach 3,000 hits (he should do it by the time he is 37) and 500 home runs. Even if he doesn’t hit those milestones, he likely gets in the Hall of Fame.
Robinson Cano
A lot of people seem to forget about this guy. He is a .310 hitter with 218 home runs as a second baseman. He has won two Gold Gloves and has finished in the top six of the MVP voting six times. He is also only 32. In another five years (at the age of 36), he could have over 300 home runs, 2,500 hits and 1,300 RBIs.
Adrian Beltre
Adrian Beltre
Barring injury, Beltre should actually reach 3,000 hits before Pujols. He is at 2,600 hits and will be 36 in April. He also has 395 career home runs and four Gold Gloves. If he stays healthy, he should reach 3,000 hits by the age of 38. When he does, he will be only the ninth player ever with 3,000 hits and 400 home runs (one of those is Alex Rodriguez). I doubt he gets to 500 home runs, but he doesn’t need to. 3,000 hits is automatic Hall of Fame, but if he falls short, he should get in anyway. It just might take him longer.
David Ortiz’s own special category
David Ortiz
I couldn’t figure out what category to put David Ortiz in, so I just put him in his own category because Ortiz creates a unique debate. I’ve seen in a baseball group on Facebook that he is the most polarising player in the game other than Pete Rose, which surprised me, because I’m used to Boston fans who love him. Ortiz is pretty close to Hall of Fame numbers just looking at his raw stats, including 466 regular season home runs and 17 postseason home runs (His postseason resume includes a World Series MVP and an ALCS MVP). He also has 10 All-Star appearances and has finished in the top five of the MVP voting five times. I think it will help his case a lot if he can reach 500 home runs. Look at Fred McGriff at 493 home runs who can’t get in the Hall of Fame.
However, Ortiz presents a bit of a conundrum for two reasons. One is he’s been a DH most of his career and secondly, there are pretty strong suspicions that he has juiced. Looking at the DH question, I’d respond that there’s already two players in the Hall of Fame who played a lot of games at DH — Frank Thomas and Paul Molitor. Thomas played over half of his games (1,300) at DH while Molitor played more than 1,100 games at DH. I don’t understand the Hall of Fame bias against the DH. It’s a position that has been around for more than 40 years now, and guys like Reggie Jackson and Harmon Killebrew didn’t get in the Hall of Fame because they played the field.
The bigger issue with Ortiz is going to be the PED suspicions. Ortiz tested positive for something in 2003. He insists it was a supplement. No one knows what it is; that information has never been released. I try to point this out when people say Ortiz tested positive for steroids — “No, you don’t know that for a fact, you don’t know what he tested positive for.” I think the suspicions will hurt his Hall of Fame vote, but one thing that I think will help Ortiz a LOT is if Mike Piazza and Jeff Bagwell are voted into the Hall of Fame ahead of him. There are also strong suspicions about Piazza (in fact, Piazza admitted he took Andro in the 1990s, back when it wasn’t against the rules of baseball and it could be bought off a shelf) and Bagwell. Piazza got 69 percent of the Hall of Fame vote in 2014 and I predict he gets in the Hall in 2015. Bagwell got 59 percent of the vote in 2014 and I think he has a legitimate shot at the Hall of Fame in 2015 when the only shoo-ins are Ken Griffey Jr. and Trevor Hoffmann. With Piazza and Bagwell, who aren’t in the Hall for one reason and one reason only — suspicion — finally making the Hall of Fame, that will help Ortiz’s case, I believe. Hall of Fame voters are starting to ignore suspicions.
Too Early to Tell, but Guys off to a Good Start
Mike Trout
He’s only in his fourth year, but he has a Rookie of the Year award, an MVP, and two second-place MVP finishes. His numbers dipped slightly last year, but he is off to such a spectacular start to his young career, he certainly looks like a Hall of Famer already.
Felix Hernandez
Felix Hernandez
Hernandez to me is close to the “likely” category. I think he needs a few more strong years to make his case. He has a Cy Young (he could have won another one last year, IMO) and has already won 125 games before the age of 29. He has twice led the league in ERA and struck out over 200 batters six times. He could pitch another 10 years and he could win another 125 games at least. We’ll see. 250 is the new 300, I believe. One of the things that has hurt him a bit is a lack of run support in Seattle, but the Mariners are putting together a better team behind him. Another thing that hurts him is for an elite pitcher, he ends up with a ton of no-decisions (86 no-decisions in 10 seasons. Again, I think lack of run support is part of the reason for that. ); It might be completely unfair, but wins is something voters look at. Hernandez has only won more than 15 games once.
Buster Posey
A Rookie of the Year, MVP winner, batting champion (as a catcher), three-time World Series winner, .308 hitter and he’s only been in the league five years. He is still only 28.
Craig Kimbrel
I’m not a big fan of the saves stat, but he has an incredible 186 saves in his first four full seasons. And an incredible 476 strikeouts in 289 innings. He won’t be 27 until May. A Rookie of the Year award winner and already has won two Rolaids Relief Pitcher awards. Top five in the Cy Young voting twice (though relief pitchers virtually never win Cy Youngs anymore).
Andrew McCutchen
Has an MVP and two other top-3 MVP finishes. .299 career hitter with power (128 home runs) and speed (143 steals) in only six years. He is only 28 and has a lot of years left.
Madison Bumgarner
Honestly, if not for his World Series exploits, I don’t know if I would put him on the list, but you can’t ignore what he has done in the postseason so far (and I believe postseason play helps with the voting). He’s been on three World Series winners, has a World Series MVP, an NLCS MVP and is 4-0 with a mind-blowing 0.25 ERA in the World Series. He is 67-49 overall in five seasons, but he is still only 25. He could have a lot of years left.
Giancarlo Stanton
Giancarlo Stanton
He’s only 25 and already has 154 career home runs. He’s had three 30+ home run seasons out of five full seasons. He needs to stay healthy. He’s had two major injuries so far. He finished second as an MVP last year. He could have over 300 home runs before he hits 30.
Guys with a Shot — get back to me in five years
I would say probably most of these guys will not make the Hall of Fame but I am throwing their names out there for the heck of it. I see these as guys who have had solid careers so far but are probably currently short of the Hall of Fame. However, with another four or five excellent years, some of them might have a chance. What I keep thinking is, honestly, five years ago, I would not have thought of Adrian Beltre as a Hall of Famer, but he has had a nice resurgence of his career in his early- to mid-30s. These guys are all capable of a similar kind of resurgence. These are people that I put in the category of “get back to me in five years and we’ll see where they’re at.”
Yadier Molina
Yadier Molina
Simply the best defensive catcher of his generation. Seven straight Gold Gloves. He doesn’t hit a lot of home runs or drive in a lot of runs (his best RBI year is 80) so his offence gets overlooked, but he’s hit over .300 four times and is a career .284 hitter. An outstanding defensive catcher hitting over .300 is nothing to sneeze at. If he ends up with 10-12 Gold Gloves and has at least a couple more years hitting over .300, you have to take him seriously for the Hall of Fame.
CC Sabathia
Believe it or not, he is still only 34 and already has 208 wins. His productivity has gone down the last couple of years and he’s had some injuries, but if he regains his health, pitches effectively for another five or six years and ends up with 260 to 270 wins, you have to take him seriously for the Hall of Fame. He has won a Cy Young and finished in the top five of the Cy Young voting four other times.
Joe Mauer
Has won three batting titles and an MVP and is a career .319 hitter. He is still only 32, so another five or six years over .300, he has a chance for the Hall of Fame. Plus, Steve Lardy gets mad if I don’t include at least one Minnesota Twin. Last year, his numbers dipped.
Dustin Pedroia
Dustin Pedroia
A .299 hitter who has won an MVP and a Rookie of the Year award. His power numbers have dipped because of a bad thumb, but he has had surgery on the thumb. He is also an outstanding defensive player. Four Gold Gloves and amazingly has made a total of 40 errors in eight full seasons — at second base. Steve Sax once had 30 errors at second base … in one season. Pedroia averages five errors a year … at second base. His offence declined last year and he needs to regain his offensive form he had earlier in his career to have a good shot at the Hall of Fame. He’s still only 31.
Justin Verlander
152 wins in 10 seasons, an MVP, a Rookie of the Year award and a Cy Young (as well as second-place and third-place Cy Young finishes two other seasons). Led the league in strikeouts three times. His velocity and productivity have really dropped in the past two seasons, however. He is still only 32. If he can regain some of the form he had earlier in his career, gets over 200 wins, he has a shot at the Hall of Fame.
Max Scherzer
He is still only 30. He has a Cy Young and is 91-50 in six full seasons with over 200 strikeouts three straight seasons. I wouldn’t bother mentioning him, except Washington just gave him $210 million over seven years … they must know something.
Jimmy Rollins
He is only a .267 career hitter, and the only reason I’ve included him on this list is, believe it or not, he actually has a plausible chance at 3,000 hits. Jimmy Rollins is only 35 and has 2,306 hits. If he averages 140 hits over the next five years … he is at 3,000, and deserves to be in the Hall of Fame discussion. Rollins has won an MVP and once had an incredible season in which he had 30 HRs, 20 triples and 40 stolen bases. No one else has ever done that in the history of baseball. Add to that four Gold Gloves.
Jose Reyes
A somewhat underrated player, I believe. He has a batting title, led the league in triples four times and led the league in steals three times and led the league in hits once. And a .291 career hitter. He is still only 32 and could easily end up with more than 2,500 hits and 600 steals in another five years.
Adam Wainwright
He has finished in the top 3 of the Cy Young vote four times. Has won 20 games twice and 19 or more games four times. He has 119 wins at 33, and a career ERA of 3.01. If he wins about 70 games over the next five years … time to talk.
Joey Votto
He is still just 31. He had a down year last year, but before 2014, he had five seasons over .300 and five seasons with 24 or more home runs. He has won an MVP and came in sixth two other years. .310 career hitter who walks a lot (he has led the NL in OBP four times), hits a ton of doubles and has a career OPS of .950. An all-around solid player, but he needs to do more to get in the Hall.
Honourable mentions for discussion — Chase Utley, Troy Tulowitzki, Mark Buehrle, Mark Teixeira, David Price, Zack Greinke, Carlos Beltran, Evan Longoria, Tim Hudson, Justin Morneau, Jacoby Ellsbury, Jon Lester. I’m sure there’s LOTS of others who could be mentioned that I didn’t think of.
CDC anti-smoking testimonial. That’s a hole in his throat he is covering up.
The Centers for Disease Control has released a new series of “Tips from Former Smokers” ads designed to seriously turn people off of smoking — we’re talking missing teeth, operation scars and ….needles in the eyes (and yes, I watched with my hand in front of my face.).
The needles in the eye involve a testimonial from a woman suffering from macular degeneration in her eyes caused by smoking. From a story done by NBC last week on this campaign:
This year, Marlene, who isn’t fully identified, tells about having to endure regular treatments for macular degeneration. “Please don’t end up like me. Don’t sit in a doctor’s chair, have a clamp put on your eye, and have needles stuck in your eyeballs. It’s horrible,” Marlene, who is 68, told NBC News.
I get these ads on my Facebook feeds from time to time and I’ve watched a few of them. Great for NBC News to do a feature on the “Tips from Former Smokers” campaign, focusing on the cringe-worthiness of the ads.
Part of the emphasis of the “Tips from Former Smokers” campaign is sending the message that smoking doesn’t just cause lung cancer. Research has shown that smoking either causes or is a huge risk factor for a wide variety of diseases, including COPD, diabetes, sight loss and arthritis. I’ve personally seen how smoking probably made my mom’s arthritis much worse, if it didn’t downright cause it to begin with.
Dr. Tim McAfee, head of the CDC Smoking and Health Office, claims that the campaign has prompted 100,000 smokers to quit.
Some of the stories from former smokers quoted in the CDC campaign and NBC story:
Julia, a 58-year-old Mississippi native, advises on how to use a colostomy bag in one video. “I smoked and I got colon cancer,” she says. “What I hated the most was the colostomy bag. That’s where they re-route your intestines, so you have bowel movements that go into a bag.”
One tip: Get a sense of humor. “You’ll need it,” she says.
“When you have a hole in your neck…be very careful shaving,” advises Shawn, 50, of Washington state, a smoker who got throat cancer.
I have put this documentary in my Netflix queue, though I have a feeling it will be really bad for my blood pressure. This is a documentary by the Robert Kenner, who also made “Food, Inc.” about how the oil industry, chemical industry and pharmaceutical companies have copied the same techniques used for many years by Big Tobacco to “change the narrative” about the dangers of their product (in the case of the oil industry, global warming), by sowing the seeds of doubt and confusion in the American product. The movie has the same title of a book I have to get my hands on by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway.
The purveyors of doubt have been extremely successful in shaping public opinion on global warming, unfortunately, by creating the idea that “there is no scientific consensus” that man is causing climate change, even though 97 percent of scientists involved in the fields of climate, meteorology, etc., have actually reached this consensus. By finding a few loud voices (and likely paying some of those voices handsomely) to rail against the consensus, the industry has pretty effectively changed the discourse and changed public attitudes about global warming. Most polls show roughly half of respondents don’t believe mankind is creating the problem of global warming.
Tobacco was very successful in its campaign to confuse the public for decades. For years, Big Tobacco found its own scientists to refute the growing evidence that cigarettes were behind the epidemic of lung cancer cases that began around the 1930s (roughly 30 years after cigarettes starting becoming popular.). Some of the same exact people who cut their teeth in a massive disinformation campaign for tobacco actually went on to work for the chemical industry and oil industry.
From a New York Times review of “Merchants of Doubt”:
“If you can ‘do tobacco,’ ” one of the perpetrators is quoted as saying, “you can do just about anything in public relations.”
The awesome book, “A Cigarette Century” chronicles in exquisite detail the steps that the tobacco industry went to counter the concerns over cigarettes. The U.S. Surgeon General’s report on lung cancer and smoking came out way back in 1964 and you would have thought this would be the death knell for the tobacco industry. Yet, the smoking rate remained stubbornly high over the next 30 years. Why? Doubt. Confusion. Paid shills. No one knew what to believe.
The tobacco industry established its own laboratories and did its own research, partly to generate data it believed would disprove the fears over lung cancer and smoking. Instead, the tobacco industry’s own data confirmed those fears and the industry kept this information under wraps for decades until it finally came gushing out in the 1980s and 1990s mostly through the discovery process of numerous lawsuits against the tobacco industry.
Meanwhile, the industry continued to maintain the safety of its products, putting filters on the cigarettes (which essentially do nothing) and having doctors in ads and promoting their products as safer than other brands. Incredibly, as late as the mid-1990s, tobacco executives continued to insist during congressional hearings that nicotine was not addictive, despite the reams and reams of evidence proving otherwise.
Like I said, this movie will not be good for my blood pressure. One of the reasons I get so worked up about it was arguing with my mom after my dad died of lung cancer at 49. First, she insisted that it was Hodgkin’s disease, not lung cancer from the four packs a day he smoked. Then, she claimed if he got lung cancer, it was from air pollution. The “air pollution is causing the epidemic of lung cancer” line is STRAIGHT out of the Big Tobacco disinformation campaign from the 1950s. Twenty-five years later, that stuck in my mom’s head. Twenty-five years later, she used that as a rationale to continue smoking and now she is dealing with severe COPD.
Sigh. The lies people tell. And the people that listen to them.
John Oliver will be glad to hear this. (Thank you Orcas for the tip on this story).
Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg announced this week a $4 million fund to help small countries around the world with their legal battles against Big Tobacco. Gates is contributing through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Bloomberg through the Bloomberg Foundation.
Oliver has been pounding away on this issue on his HBO show, “Last Week Tonight.” When small countries attempt to control tobacco branding and tobacco advertising, they get sued by Big Tobacco into submission though world trade agreement laws and courts into dropping their proposals. This has happened in Uruguay, Togo, Ireland and especially Australia (OK, not so small of a country, but it’s been a bloody legal battle there.).
In this quote from a Guardian article about the announcement, Bill Gates said:
“Country leaders who are trying to protect their citizens from the harms of tobacco should not be deterred by threats of costly legal challenges from huge tobacco companies. Australia won its first case, which sends a strong message. But smaller, developing countries don’t have the same resources. That’s why we are supporting the Anti-Tobacco Trade Litigation Fund with Bloomberg Philanthropies.”
Added Margaret Chan, director general of the World Health Organization:
“In an ominous trend, in some countries the battle between tobacco and health has moved into the courts. Governments wishing to protect their citizens through larger pictorial warnings on cigarette packs or by introducing plain packaging are being intimidated by industry’s threats of lengthy and costly litigation. This is an effort to deprive governments of their sovereign right to legislate in the public interest. We will push back hard.”
I hope $4 million is just a start, because I suspect the international Big Tobacco companies have a vastly bigger legal war chest than that. Anyway, it’s great that people are recognizing the problem that Oliver has exposed on his show.
The tobacco industry has been aggressively trying to expand to international markets, since smoking has dropped so dramatically in the West. The industry particularly salivates over Africa, India and Southeast Asia, where laws and governments are weaker and the smoking rates higher than in the West. (The industry would expand into China bigtime if China allowed it, but the tobacco market there is state-controlled.)
Bloomberg is a noted anti-smoking advocate … you could even call him a zealot (I know some New Yorkers would). As the mayor of New York, he oversaw a number of restrictions on smoking (strict smoking bans not only in bars and restaurants, but in parks) and tax increases for cigarettes. He could be accused of taking his health campaign too far into “nanny state” territory because he also tried to ban large sodas in New York, a move that was ruled illegal by the courts. His heart is in the right place, at least.
