This Bud's not for the Phils

Turns out there is crying in baseball. It happens whenever sensible people witness one of those over-the-top champagne celebrations like the Phillies enjoyed Saturday.

No one is quite certain when these rituals began, though it's likely they're a hybrid of the triumphant players' desire for an upgrade from beer and the champagne-spraying that long marked Grand Prix victory ceremonies.

For nearly a century, the game's champions celebrated in a fashion befitting their modest incomes. Locker rooms were too cramped and smelly for serious partying. Owners were too cheap to spring for champagne. And beer was the accepted postgame drink of choice.

But in the 1970s, just about the time free agency dawned, the televised champagne celebration got legs. With affluence came effluence and the congratulatory postgame beer soon devolved into a Niagara of carbonated craziness.

With each passing season, the bubbly, bacchanalian bashes that follow every September and October milestone mean less and less. They've lost their spontaneity, their meaning. They seem childish, clichéd, staged and, given the sport's longstanding problems with alcohol, terribly ill-conceived.

You could probably make a case for such outbursts after a World Series triumph. But after a division clinching? A division series? A league championship series? How long will it be before we see first-place teams celebrating their standing at the all-star break?

These scenes have become an embarrassment on so many levels:

If nothing else, they're sybaritic wastes of money in the midst of the worst recession in nearly a century. Televising them is akin to airing fraternity parties. Their authenticity has been diminished since they've become vehicles to market newly minted T-shirts and hats. And while we laugh as this kind of testosterone-fueled behavior in Animal House, we cringe at it in real life.

Worst of all, watching the idols of America's youth get drunk and stupid can't be good for anyone, not the game, not the players, and certainly not the kids who adore them.

Sure, the accumulated rigors of a 162-game schedule require some sort of emotional release. But wouldn't a few group beers or a heartfelt champagne toast away from the cameras be the mature response?

After all, we're not talking about 18-year-olds here. These are supposedly intelligent men in their late 20s and 30s. Men with wives and, God forbid, children.

There's precedent for the private celebration. As recently as the 1980 World Series, Steve Carlton and a few of his victorious Phillies teammates celebrated off camera, in the trainer's room, with a little fine wine and champagne. Maybe they got drunk, too. But if so, they did it like adults.

What is baseball thinking? Are these sudsy spectacles producing the kind of image the multibillion-dollar business wants to project? Players pouring champagne down each other's pants? Drinking it two-fistedly? Or, as happened in at least one instance a year ago, chugging it out of a protective cup?

Seems more like one of Vince McMahon's Christmas parties than America's pastime.

And what about the more serious implications of all this public drinking?

All the Roberto Clemente Awards and community service efforts in the world won't whitewash the memory of Nick Adenhart's alcohol-related death or Mickey Mantle's alcohol-stained legacy.

Baseball, of course, is trapped in a conundrum. If it preaches alcohol-related responsibility too fervently, it risks alienating the beer industry, with whom the sport has long been joined at the lips.

Have you been to a game lately? There's beer pong in the parking lots, beer guzzling in the grandstands, beer advertising in the outfield. In such an atmosphere, what's one good-natured clubhouse orgy going to hurt?

Once in a while it seems like change is coming. MLB last year urged clubs to try to limit the champagne at these celebrations. The 2010 Rangers, in deference to star Josh Hamilton's past addiction problems, even substituted ginger ale.

And yet baseball continues to enable this foolishness. Lockers are carefully covered with protective plastic. Tubs of champagne are set out in the middle of the clubhouse to facilitate the fun. Cameras, normally banned from the immediate aftermaths of games, are permitted to set up inside.

Fortunately, like all traditions, this, too, will pass. Someone will die in a post-party crash, or some team will get sued, or some unimaginable embarrassment will show up on YouTube.

The champagne will vanish. The behavior will improve. And we'll look back on these senseless rituals the way we now look back on public floggings or straw hats and wonder how we all could have been so stupid.