Baseball, a historic advertising medium for the tobacco industry

For over a century, the tobacco industry has been exploiting and infiltrating sports to convey a positive image of its products, which are incompatible with physical activity. In particular, baseball, which is particularly popular in the United States, was quickly seen by cigarette manufacturers as a means of communication and advertising aimed at encouraging smoking. Even today, the consumption of new tobacco and nicotine products is still very popular among baseball players, due to an effective strategy on the part of the tobacco industry.[1].

As early as the late 19th century, manufacturers used cards with images of famous baseball players to stiffen tobacco packages, as shown by Stanford University research on the impact of tobacco advertising. Some baseball players were even depicted using chewing tobacco, making them ambassadors for the manufacturers and helping to associate tobacco use with sports culture. In the following decades, the tobacco industry's closeness to baseball was reinforced, and embodied by some of the greatest figures in American baseball (Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle).

An association of imaginations built for over a century by tobacco manufacturers

As early as 1912, the tobacco company WT Blackwell and Co., the manufacturer of Bull Durham tobacco, created a successful advertising campaign by installing billboards in most major baseball stadiums. The manufacturer also promised that each player who touched the billboards would receive $50, the equivalent of $1,000 today. Some researchers hypothesize that the association of Bull Durham brand imagery with these baseball games may explain the origin of the word "bullpen," the part of the stadium in which pitchers warm up before entering the game. Furthermore, advertising in and around stadiums has been a particularly strategic investment for the tobacco industry in the United States, especially since 1971, when television advertising was banned. These transfers of investment from one advertising vector to another lead the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control to recommend a complete ban on advertising.

A strategy still at work on the part of the tobacco and nicotine industry

In 2016, Major League Baseball implemented measures to limit smokeless tobacco use among players, including a ban on smoking these products during games or face sanctions. As in other sports, the use of new nicotine products, such as nicotine pouches, is growing, largely because they do not contain tobacco. However, as the Truth Initiative points out, smokeless tobacco use is not limited to professional players: data from 2015 already showed that the prevalence of this category among athletes was higher than that of non-athletes.

FT