Josh Hancock details from police

Actually two drinks on an empty stomach in under an hour will get a woman pretty damned close to .08 or even over. Three will put most men in the same area (on an empty stomach). [mythbusters]

 

Leave spnited out of this.

 

I don't know if there will ever be a national outrage. Why? Because you're taking two different acts that, each by itself is perfectly legal. The illegality comes when the two are combined, but it's not illegal up to a certain point. So people leave a bar feeling a little bit of a buzz but they think (usually incorrectly) that they're not over the legal limit.

And the limit itself is kind of a problem. We don't read news reports about fatal accidents caused be a driver at .08 or .09. The fatals are alway involving drivers at twice the legal limit or worse. Thus, in the end, most people really aren't against drinking and driving, they're only against driving while completely blotto and causing a fatal accident.

And when we have people calling for zero tolerance, the high percentage of people who can have a drink or two and drive home with no problem start thinking STFU.

 

An odd little story from the Nashville paper on Tuesday:

http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=200770508074

My first thought is to wonder if he'd lost his Missouri license, but surely somebody checked on that last week.

 

So Hancock finagled the bagel to get a clean license? That's great news -- next round's on me!

 

Negative...

A lot of his stuff was from Tennessee...including his cell phone #. That's kind of where he had set up shop in the offseason in 05-06.

 

I guess it's OK in Tenn. not to provide your actual home address for a non-commercial license.

 

Good column by Saraceno today with his take on booze and baseball:
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/columnist/saraceno/2007-05-09-saraceno_N.htm

 

http://www.suntimes.com/sports/deluca/379460,CST-SPT-deluca10.article

DeLuca in today's Sun-Times has the most intelligent take on the baseball and booze I've read in the past two weeks. Very refreshing to read someone who doesn't feel a need to fall in line with the hand-wringing, pseudo-moralists who write what they think people want to hear rather than the truth.

 

Kudos to the S-T.

 

Funny thing is that I've been in one major league clubhouse, and one of the two people I talked to was drinking beer at his locker.

One thing that hasn't been addressed in the DeLuca column is the college baseball scene. I think it's at that level that a lot of guys develop drinking problems.

Also worth mentioning is that this notion of drinking responsibly is a line of BS. In 90 percent of cases, people are drinking to get drunk. If you're getting drunk, there is a level of irresponsibility to what you're doing. In a lot of cases, people will cut off the drinking once the benefits of drunkenness no longer outweigh the level of irresponsibility that comes with it. In rare cases, people cut off the drinking before any real problems surface, but they're riding a fine line just by picking up that first beer because it makes it easier to pick up a second and then a third. Everyone has been drunk when they didn't plan to be drunk.

The problem is that alcohol inhibits your ability to think clearly. Just as you're more likely to have a second drink after you've had that first drink, you're going to think a little more before deciding not to drive drunk. And if other factors come into play, such as a hot blonde at the bar across town, you know exactly what's going to happen.

I don't know whether that makes me a moralist, but I do know that sportswriters are probably the worst folks to lead a discussion on drinking.

 

Other than an accident or getting arrested, there is one more potential deterrent, and that's jail.

Georgia has adopted mandatory jail time on your first offense, and I've seen that deter folks real fast.

What I'd love to see is cops sitting outside stadiums after games and picking people off like fish in a barrel.