Thomas Nugent, a shortstop on Wilmette’s 11-year-old Broncos traveling team, figures he goes through a pouch a week of shredded gum. He likes the taste and can blow big league-size bubbles without losing focus — with one exception.
Michael Graham looks out from the dugout while blowing a bubble with Big League Chew at Roemer Park in Wilmette on Wednesday. (Tribune / William DeShazer)
“I don’t blow bubbles when I’m batting,” he said. “It’s kind of distracting.”
As Thomas 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 brand Big League Chew 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 has generated controversy because of its 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 during a game one night. 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 gum’s name, never made it past Single-A ball but certainly belongs in the hall of fame for chewing gum.
Growing up in the 1950s on Long Island, he recalled how he chewed gum by the mouthful, inspired by the big plugs 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 bubble gum 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. During that night game in 1977, he shared his idea with Bouton as they sat in the bullpen. Bouton 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 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 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 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.
He said he and Bouton were disgusted by their Portland Mavericks teammates’ pranks of spitting tobacco juice on one another’s white cleats. 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 bubble gum,” Nelson said.
With so much dead time, baseball is ideal for gum chewing, he said.
As balls popped into gloves and bubbles burst at Roemer Park, a 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. He rarely leaves home without his glove — and his gum.
Teammate Jake Deutsch 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.
—Dan Simmons
