GARAGIOLA ON ANTI-CHEW CRUSADE.

Byline: Angelo Bruscas Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Joe Garagiola's book ``Baseball is a Funny Game'' established the former ballplayer in the early 1960s as one of the sport's wittiest quipsters.

But Garagiola gets deadly serious when he makes the rounds of major-league cities these days.

At 70 and the picture of health, he is on a mission about a baseball subject that is no laughing matter - the use of smokeless tobacco by major-league ballplayers.

A former user himself since the day he broke into the big leagues in 1946 with the St. Louis Cardinals, Garagiola was in Seattle on Wednesday with his good friend and former outfielder Bill Tuttle, whose face has been disfigured by treatments for oral cancer.

While they did not directly confront any of the players before Wednesday night's Seattle Mariners-Kansas City Royals game at the Kingdome, they did hold several news conferences to draw attention to the link between cancer and the use of chewing and dipping tobacco products, which they call spit tobacco.

``There are two things in baseball that are taken as tradition, but they're really not: One is scratching . . . and the other is the tobacco,'' said Garagiola, national chairman of the National Spit Tobacco Education Program.

Tuttle, who has had 51 radiation treatments on one side of his mouth and five operations, used chewing tobacco throughout 11 years in the big leagues with the Tigers, A's and Twins.

If it hadn't been for the cancer, he said, he would still be chewing today.

Tuttle, 67, said 40 years of chewing tobacco have left him barely able to talk or hear, unable to chew because his teeth have been lost, and barely able to raise his right arm because all the muscle was removed during major reconstructive surgery.

``Fortunately it hasn't killed me, but it left me pretty much deformed,'' Tuttle said. ``Not everybody who chews will get something like this, but your chances will go up. I'm proof of what it can do to you.''

Garagiola, Tuttle and Tuttle's wife, Gloria, spoke Wednesday to the Washington State Dental Association and at a news conference at the Kingdome, where they were joined in support by Mariners catcher Dan Wilson and Royals pitcher Jeff Montgomery, who do not use chewing or dipping tobacco.