Great Expectorations: Why Baseball Players Spit So Much

In polite society, spitting is considered rude. In baseball, it’s virtually mandatory. At every and any game in Major League Baseball, you’re almost guaranteed to see a player or coach turn his head to spit—into the grass, into the air, into their glove, and occasionally at the feet of an official.

What does spewing saliva have to do with baseball? How did it get started? And when does spitting go from tradition to foul?

1. The Origins of Spitting in Baseball
2. Why Players Continue to Spit

The Origins of Spitting in Baseball

Spitting is a holdover from baseball’s formative years in the 1800s, when many players considered chewing tobacco as important to their on-field performance as cleats. It wasn’t that the nicotine improved their skills: It was that games were often held on extremely dry, dusty baseball diamonds that lacked the expert grass maintenance of today’s stadiums. Rather than play with a perpetually dry mouth, athletes chewed to keep their production of saliva going. Any excess was spit out or used to moisten the dry leather of their gloves.

Aiding the tradition was that chewing tobacco was often sponsoring baseball. “Back then you had advertisers using baseball as the hook,” Andy Walls, director of the Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame and Museum, told WVXU in 2024. “It was just hand-in-hand; it went together. A lot of players chewed tobacco and that created that spitting, because you would build up the saliva and you certainly wouldn’t swallow that spit, so you’d spit that out.”

At times, tobacco chomping was even a little malicious: Some pitchers spit tarry tobacco on a ball to make it harder for the batter to visualize and therefore hit, a bit of dirty play that was ultimately banned in 1920.

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By the 1960s, thanks to more knowledge of its adverse health effects, tobacco use was on the wane. (It’s now largely banned from the league.) Instead, players chewed on sunflower seeds or gum. Seed shells needed to be ejected; gum is also going to increase saliva production. In any case, players were going to continue spitting.

Why Players Continue to Spit

While spitting is a practical matter, it’s also found in players who aren’t eating seeds or popping chewing gum.

Think of Little League players who observe the pros on television or in stadiums. In addition to emulating their batting technique, younger athletes will also mimic their behaviors, including the compulsive loogie-hocking.

Chewing and spitting may also provide a kind of tension release. “You got a lot of nervous energy when you’re playing, so you need something that distracts you a bit,” Justin Morneau, a former first baseman for the Minnesota Twins, told CBS News in 2011.

There’s also an element to baseball not often present in other sports: plenty of idle time. Players awaiting a hit in the outfield or waiting for their turn at bat or waiting to do, well, anything invites some kind of activity. With knitting or streaming a TV show out, chewing on something is about all that’s left.

There may also be a communication aspect to spitting. Writing for Psychology Today in 2010, Dr. Mary Lamia observed that “If spitting can protect a person by evoking disgust in the observer, then, given the consequences, it might be considered as an aggressive or contemptuous display. Evoking disgust in another person can be a way to cope with, or disguise, one’s own anxiety. It expresses a fearless attitude of disdain, condescension, or disregard.” 

In other words, spitting may be a kind of posturing. It’s a way of saying you’re not bothered by a great hitter at bat, or that your team is down 12 runs. Spitting communicates confidence.

In basketball, spit is going to wind up on the court, where dozens of players spewing phlegm would become a slip hazard. In football, your show of confidence may wind up stuck to your helmet. An Olympic gymnast dismounting and horking up a chunk of tobacco would be bizarre. But in baseball, spit is just part of the game.