America is drinking less than ever — and the same is true for baseball players

There is a mini-fridge, stocked with beer, tucked away under a counter inside the New York Mets’ home clubhouse.

More often than not, a metal laundry cart obstructs the cooler from view and from use. Not that it gets much action, anyway. After most games, those rows of Millers and Coors are left untouched. Every once in a while, a particularly thirsty Met will wander over and scoop out a cold one — Pete Alonso, for instance, cracked a brew after passing Darryl Strawberry for the franchise’s home run record — but generally, the box of suds is a vestige of an era gone by.

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Instead, many Mets players return to their lockers to find a small bottle of tart cherry juice. The antioxidant beverage — purported to reduce inflammation, supplement recovery and enhance sleep — has skyrocketed in popularity among athletes. And so, it is much more common these days to see a half-dressed ballplayer downing a cherry juice, a smoothie or a protein shake than it is to see one nursing a lager, an ale or a fifth of whiskey.

Such is professional baseball in 2025.

‘You hear the stories, but you can’t do that’

Conversations with more than 30 major-league players, coaches and front-office personnel point toward a definitive trend: Ballplayers are drinking less than ever before.

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“It’s become a European style of drinking, where it’s like, ‘I’m gonna have something to enjoy it,’” one multi-time All-Star told Yahoo Sports. “It’s not to get drunk, go out, f***ing raise hell because, like, you can’t do that. You hear the stories, but you can’t do that. You just can’t.”

Nearly all the figures interviewed for this story pointed to a combination of factors behind the downtick in boozing. Some emphasized the omnipresence of social media and the unease of being intoxicated in public as a public figure. Others focused on the increasing legality and availability of marijuana, preferred by many as an alternative to drinking. One throughline for everybody was the heightened level of competition in the big leagues compared to in prior eras. Pitchers have never thrown harder, hitters have never swung faster; sacrificing any edge for a hard night out is simply not worth the trade-off.

Whatever the reason, baseball’s teetotalling turn mirrors a larger societal trend.

Last month, a Gallup poll revealed that a record-low 54% of American adults said they consume alcohol. That decline has been propelled, in large part, by young adults and Gen-Zers. A 2023 study from the University of Michigan found that “Binge drinking in the past two weeks was reported by 27.2% of young adults [ages 19-30], which is the lowest level the study has ever recorded. Daily use of alcohol also reached a new all-time study low in 2023, reported by 3.6% of young adults. Measures of drinking in the past 30 days, daily drinking, and binge drinking have all decreased over the past 10 years.”

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MLB players, however, would seem to be a demographic uniquely susceptible to heavy drinking. During the season, big leaguers spend half their time on the road, usually away from their families. They are disproportionately surrounded by other men in their 20s and 30s. Money, for nearly all players, is no barrier. And perhaps most importantly, ballplayers work a stressful, high-intensity job that usually ends late at night. Traditionally, that led players searching for a way to decompress after games to alcohol and nights out.

Baseball’s links to alcohol go way back

That relationship between ball and booze dates to the game’s earliest days. Babe Ruth, the sport’s original mythmaker, was renowned for his beer consumption. Fellow Hall of Famer Ty Cobb recollected: “I’ve seen him at midnight, propped up in bed, order six club sandwiches, a platter of pigs knuckles and a pitcher of beer. He’d down all that while smoking a big, black cigar.” Legendary Yankees outfielder Mickey Mantle, whose career was derailed in his early 30s by alcohol abuse, admitted that during his heyday, he regularly played while hungover.

The 1980s Mets, a raucous bachelor party disguised as a ballclub, would drink together before, during and after games. Former slugger and current color commentator Keith Hernandez was famous for having a bucket of ice-cold beers waiting for him postgame so that he could partake while he chatted with reporters. His teammate and current broadcast partner, Ron Darling, wrote in his book “Game 7, 1986: Failure and Triumph in the Biggest Game of My Life” that Mets hitters would shotgun beers during games.

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“They’d time it so that they were due to hit third or fourth that inning,” he wrote, “and in their minds, that rush of beer would kind of jump-start the amphetamines and get back to how they were feeling early on in the game — pumped, jacked, good to go.”

The legend about Wade Boggs hammering 100 beers on a single team flight — Boggs insists the number was closer to 70 — has become the most enduring part of his Hall of Fame career. And in the early 2000s, Derek Jeter developed a reputation for frequenting the Big Apple’s club scene. His galavanting grew public enough that in 2003, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner lambasted his star shortstop in the New York Daily News. Later, from the safety of retirement, Jeter confirmed what most already knew: He loved going out.

“Monday was China Club, Tuesday was Spa, Wednesday was Envy, Thursday was Cheetah. The list goes on and on and on,” he told the Wall Street Journal in 2022. “Back in the day, there was Page Six, and it was all rumors. Now, it’s a little tougher to move around. Back in the day, you were either there and experienced it and had a good time, or you weren’t and you heard about it.

“Now, everyone shares so much.”

‘Going out to a bar or club is practically nonexistent’

Many current players, including some whose careers overlapped with Jeter’s, echoed The Captain’s sentiment. One high-profile multi-time All-Star, asked why players tend to not go out as much anymore, fished into his locker and pulled out his phone.

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“These,” he insisted. “Everybody has these.”’

A different, similarly prominent All-Star recalled a story of when his team arrived at a club after winning a playoff series.

“We went out as a group, somebody set up a table somewhere,” he said. “It was fun because all of us were together, but the other people that were around, with their phones, recording us, it was pretty bothersome.”

Which brings us to another trend: “Drinking itself has gone down, but going out to a bar or club is practically nonexistent.”

That’s particularly true for marquee players and those on big-market teams such as the Yankees or Dodgers. The days of a larger-than-life personality such as Jeter peppering the tabloids with rowdy nightlife exploits are long gone. Former Mets ace Matt Harvey, whose hard-charging party lifestyle precipitated the downfall of a once-promising career, might’ve been the final star to carry that type of reputation. These days, being out after sundown with a drink in hand is just not worth the attention it brings.

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Instead, today’s baseball stars give the tabloids virtually nothing to work with. When Paul Skenes made an appearance at a bar in Omaha during the College World Series back in June, he sipped water from a plastic cup. Aaron Judge is a homebody with a newborn. The same is true for Shohei Ohtani, famous for his dedication to a regimented sleep routine.

‘Once my weed consumption went up, my ERA went down’

But just because postgame activities have become less rambunctious doesn’t mean players have cut out vice altogether.

“I don’t think guys drink as much because now they smoke and play video games,” an All-Star pitcher opined.

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One big-league manager, when asked why he thought players were drinking less, leaned back in his chair and chuckled before pinching his thumb and pointer finger together at his lips to mime the puffing of a joint.

Indeed, the legalization of marijuana across large swaths of the United States has boosted the drug’s popularity among the American population. Predictably, weed use is at an all-time high, with the aforementioned University of Michigan study pegging young adult use within the past year at 42.4%. A recent Pew report indicated that 80% of Americans live in a county with a cannabis dispensary.

As weed has become more commonplace, the stigma associated with the drug has lessened. But in that regard, baseball is still a smidge behind the times.

A different skipper, one who played in the bigs, admitted he was initially shocked and concerned when he learned that his club’s best player, a perennial All-Star, regularly uses cannabis gummies to wind down after games. During his career, the manager explained, weed was associated with laziness, ambivalence, a lack of drive — all qualities that, to a big-league manager, are an impediment to winning ballgames. But over time, the manager has realized that the occasional edible isn’t going to sidetrack anybody’s career. Instead, he has come to believe that his players are generally more equipped to recover when they opt for marijuana over alcohol.

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A number of players agreed with that, sharing that switching from booze to weed for postgame decompression has made them feel healthier overall. At this point, studies on whether cannabis use is beneficial to athletes are mixed. On the other hand, it’s nearly certain that regular alcohol consumption actively hinders recovery and overall fitness.

As one National League reliever explained it: “Once my weed consumption went up, my ERA went down.”

It has never been so difficult to be a major-league player

And that’s what it’s really all about. Performance — whether it’s motivated by winning or earning — has become more and more of a priority as baseball’s technological arms race has continued. The average fastball velocity in MLB this season is 94.4 mph, the highest figure ever and up more than 3 mph since 2007, the first year velocity was tracked and standardized. Hitters, meanwhile, are equipped with advanced scouting reports, pitch-simulating machines and batted-ball tracking tech. It has never been so difficult to be a major-league player. And the margins of competition have never been slimmer.

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It’s a very different world from when, say, in 1998, David Wells, the Yankees’ portly and beer-loving pitcher, chucked the 15th perfect game in MLB history. Wells later admitted in his autobiography, “Perfect I’m Not: Boomer on Beer, Brawls, Backaches, and Baseball,” that he accomplished the feat “half-drunk, with bloodshot eyes, monster breath and a raging, skull-rattling hangover.”

That type of behavior, generally, is a thing of the past. Most starting pitchers wouldn’t touch a drop of alcohol the night before a start, let alone engage in an all-night rager. Position players are more likely to have one or two drinks, but playing while hungover has become something of a lost art. With one notable exception: When teams clinch a playoff berth in late September and backups, doused in clubhouse champagne the night before, are shoehorned into the lineup so the regulars can wait out their headaches.

That happened to Phillies reserve catcher Garrett Stubbs, well known for his partyboy activities during locker room celebrations, in 2023. After ripping tequila shots and pounding suds following the club’s playoff-clinching win, a hungover Stubbs clobbered his first home run of the season the following afternoon.

“I felt great, actually,” he told reporters afterward. “I was probably still a little hammered from the night before.”

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‘It’s not the drinking. It’s being there together’

Across the league, the consensus is that the reduction in drinking is, generally speaking, a good thing for baseball. However, a number of veterans on playoff teams lament that building camaraderie in the age of more sobriety is a much harder task. Revelry of the unencumbered variety — the type often induced by alcohol — can be a powerful, unifying force. A legendary Scottish soccer player from the ‘80s and ‘90s named Richard Gough once declared, “The team that drinks together wins together.” The 1986 Mets built a legacy off that exact concept.

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So while modern clubhouses are wary of hitting the town in large, extremely noticeable packs, many teams have adopted a new approach to make sure camaraderie is fostered away from the diamond: show dinners.

The word “show,” in a baseball context, is often used as an adjective to describe anything high-class, supreme, top-of-the-line. A show dinner, therefore, features a few prominent veterans renting out a room at a nice restaurant for the team to indulge on a night off.

“Steakhouse. Seafood tower. Thirty-ounce, dry-aged bone-in,” Jake Burger of the Rangers explained to Yahoo Sports last year, when asked to describe a show dinner. “You might not eat the whole thing, and that’s OK.”

Predictably, show dinners tend to include a significant amount of wine, cocktails or bourbons neat, but they’re about much more than getting drunk for the sake of it.

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As one older veteran player explained, “The camaraderie is a big thing. And, like, it’s not the drinking. It’s being there together.

“It’s being around one another and having something to talk about.”