Call Him Old School? No, Call Him An Idiot

Kevin Hench of FOX doesn't think that beer in the clubhouse is a bad thing.

Call me old school, but I believe beer belongs in the clubhouse. A guy playing almost every night for six months should be able to unwind with a couple of frosties after he gets a couple of knocks. When banning alcohol in his clubhouse, Oakland GM Billy Beane said he thought the A's should behave like any other business, which, of course, is ludicrous. If Aetna insurance salespeople were having 95-mile-an-hour missiles whizzed past them in front of 40,000 people and needed a shower after work, I'd say they were entitled to a beer.

Of course they would be. And they could have it at home, or at the hotel bar.

To be fair, Hench does make a couple of good points. Beer sales in the stands have the potential to do far more damage than a player having a cold one in the clubhouse after the game. MLB has taken some steps to reduce drunkenness in the ballpark, but they will never, ever take the final, drastic step of banning beer once and for all without a catastrophic event taking place.

And I'm going to be perhaps unsympathetically harsh here, but let's face it: Josh Hancock was a damned fool, driving drunk down the highway with a cellphone stuck to his ear. He was a major league ballplayer; I'm pretty sure that he was familiar with taxicabs. And could afford to use one.