Despite sky-high unemployment and an increasingly volatile foreclosure market, the U.S. Senate continues to dedicate its time to micromanaging Major League Baseball. Instead of going after steroids or infidelity, however, Sens. Dick Durbin and Frank Lautenberg want players to stop using chewing tobacco.
“The use of smokeless tobacco by baseball players undermines the positive image of the sport and sends a dangerous message to young fans, who may be influenced by the players they look up to as role models,” the pair wrote in a letter to MLB Commissioner Bud Selig.
Lautenberg and Durbin are right. It’s time that America’s professional sports industry thought of the children. To that end, The Daily Caller suggests Congress prohibit the following aspects of commercial sports:
Base stealing: Because stealing is wrong, unless you’re stealing from taxpayers to subsidize a stadium.
NASCAR: This “sport” teaches kids that it’s OK to pass without signaling, and that people wearing brightly lit jumpsuits are waiting around every corner to pump their gas. And — hello! — what about all those unhealthy commercial sponsorships? Coors Light! Pepsi! Mars Snackfood and Petfood US! Life is not one long stretch on the New Jersey Turnpike, and NASCAR needs to get its act together before another child driver is killed while trying to pass on the outside.
Hockey: Learning to ice skate in order to play hockey is like learning to read music in order to play Creed songs. The sport was created by Canadians (or perhaps Russians), and encourages children to pursue graceless violence and toothlessness as a career choice. People who play hockey in their youth but can’t manage to join an NHL team nevertheless grow up to bad kissers and animal abusers.
Gatorade and Powerade: As any gym teacher will tell you, the average human doesn’t need as many electrolytes as are in a single serving of these two sports drinks. That’s why water boys fill their coolers with ice before they dump in the sugary flavorless concoctions “engineered” by “scientists” at the “University” of Florida. But kids don’t see what’s going on behind the scenes. Depicting sweaty athletes guzzling these drinks is part of the corn lobby’s insidious plan to give America’s youth diabetes.
Stadium concessions: A coke-and-hot dog combo at your neighborhood subsidy trap runs north of a Jackson. Did daddy work his ass off for that bratwurst? Yes he did. But junior doesn’t know the value of a dollar, and now think it’s OK to drop a week’s lunch money on 800 calories worth of cow lips and high-fructose corn syrup. Also: Remember when that Philaldephia Phillies fan got drunk and puked on that little girl’s head last baseball season? Beer sales are teaching children that it’s OK to do that.