It is a wonderful feeling to look into a major league dugout and see players chewing gum and blowing bubbles.

I can remember when cigarettes and chewing tobacco were as common in clubhouses as bats and gloves.

Tobacco has been a part of baseball since the early days of the game. Before trading cards were packaged with bubble gum, they first were first inserted into packages of Piedmont or Sweet Caporal cigarettes.

That's because many players, including early superstars such as Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner and Lou Gehrig, smoked and endorsed brands.

Babe Ruth, Mickey Cochrane, Dizzy Dean, Joe DiMaggio, all of them smoked. “I'd say most everybody in the dugouts smoked in those days,” former pitcher Elden Auker remarked in an interview with Joe Capozzi of the Palm Beach Post.

“We didn't know it did any damage to the lungs or anything. There was no medical information in those days, Everybody smoked,” said Aker, the last living pitcher to give up a home run to Babe Ruth. Auker, who pitched in the 1934 and '35 World Series, smoke about seven years. He quit around 1940. “If I continued smoking I wouldn't be around today celebrating my 95th birthday.”

Dom DiMaggio, a Boston Red Sox outfielder from 1940 to 1953, remembers the runway from the clubhouse to the dugout at Fenway Park being “littered with butts.” His famous brother Joe smoked a pack a day.

There's no definite data tracking the historical trends of players and cigarette smoking. But Dr. Herbert Severson of the Oregon Research Institute believes more and more players began kicking the habit after the 1964 Surgeon General's report that first recognized cigarette smoking as a cause of cancer and other serious diseases.

Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Palmer, who never smoked, recalls two close Baltimore Orioles teammates, shortstop Mark Bellanger and pitcher Dave McNally, smoking on team charters in the 1960s and '70s. They were both heavy smokers and both players died of lung cancer.

Dave Cash, who played second base for the Philadelphia Phillies from 1974 to 1976, said he always smoked on the bench with team manager Danny Ozark. “I smoked five years into my career and all of a sudden it caught up with me. After awhile when you're playing you get winded. I quit,” said Cash, now first base coach for the Orioles and former manager at Batavia in the New York-Penn League.

The New York Mets ace hurler Tom Glavine said lots of players were smoking when he broke into the major leagues with the Atlanta Braves in 1987. “I don't want to say it was common, but it certainly wasn't uncommon. In the clubhouse, in dugouts, on the plane, it was everywhere, part of that generation, ” he said.

Cigarettes began to all but disappear from the baseball culture with the rise of laws that banned smoking on planes, in restaurants and other public places..

“There seemed to be an effort in the early '90s to kind of do away with it,” Glavine said. “You were seeing guys get in trouble or talked to if they were seen smoking on TV.”