Judas Iscariot Superstar

Big League Chew didn't save me from riding the pine for my high school junior varisty baseball team, though I still have a soft spot for the stuff. And I was surprised to learn recently that Jim Bouton -- whose account of the 1969 season in "Ball Four" made him a persona non grata, baseball's answer to Elia Kazan -- is credited as one of the inventors of the product. Bouton's a really fascinating guy for all sorts of reasons. Apparently, he and pitcher Rob Nelson came up with the idea while teammates on the Class A Portland Mavericks in 1977, designed the packaging and formula together, and pitched it successfully to a candy company in 1980. Too late to save Lenny Dykstra (ever seen those old photos where he looks like he's got a wad of dog shit stuffed into his cheek?) from a lifetime of oral cancer, but enough to give sunflower seeds a run for the money as an alternative opiate.

Oddly enough, the website advertised on current packages -- www.bigleaguechew.com -- hasn't even been registered as a domain. But you can glean a bit of information from Jim Bouton's website, where there's a nifty image of early 80s-era Big League Chew that looks exactly like a package of Red Man Chewing Tobacco. No, really: it even bills itself as "the original tobacco style chewing gum," a tagline which was quickly dropped and replaced with "the ballplayer's bubble gum." How could they get away with that in the Just Say No era? I suspect that Bouton and Nelson didn't even begin to realize the product's potential appeal to the youth market.

By the mid-80s, though, almost all marketing was done directly to kids. You couldn't sit through 10 minutes of cartoons on a Saturday morning without seeing this completely homoerotic commerical, which adheres to the central fallacy of all 1980s advertising: stick this in your mouth and it will turn you into a completely different person! Damn if the jingle wasn't insanely catchy, though. Oh, and props to these enterprising 6th graders for blinding us with science and proving that Big League Chew blows the biggest bubbles. Now how much do I have to stuff in my mouth to turn into Don Mattingly?