Baseball's Seedless Spring

Players' Spittin' Image May Be Undermined by Sunflower Shortage

First the players' strike of '94. Now the steroids scandal. What's the next high hard one reality's going to hurl at baseball?

How about "The Great Sunflower Seed Shortage of 2005"?

Baseball players consume sunflower seeds faster than Humvees gulp gas. And around the national pastime, from Little League to the bigs, munching salty roasted seeds and spitting shells has caught up with peanuts, popcorn and Cracker Jack. (And, once, chewing tobacco.)

But here's the bad news for baseball: "Supplies are going to be very short," says John Sandbakken, director of international marketing at the National Sunflower Association in Bismarck, N.D. "The warehouses will be cleaned out and whatever is marketed will be all sold. . . . Potentially, [stores] could run out."

The Agriculture Department's ballpark figure is that this season's harvest is down 29 percent. Crop production of the pinstriped "confectionary" seeds grown for human consumption hasn't looked this bleak in more than a decade.

"They said they didn't know if they would be getting buckets in," says Danny Mills, a pitcher at McLean High School. When he and some teammates recently went searching for 60-pack team-size tubs of sunflower seeds to kick off their season, they got shut out. "There weren't any," says Mills, "only the small packages."

Experts say strike one against this season's crop was the cold, rain and snow last spring in North Dakota, South Dakota and Minnesota -- the key sunflower-growing states -- depriving growers of a home-field advantage.

Strike two was a nasty white mold that fouled 40 percent of plants. And soybeans selling for higher prices persuaded too many farmers to plant them instead -- strike three! Yer outta sunflower seeds!

"We're looking for blue skies," says Ronni Heyman, spokeswoman for David Sunflower Seeds, the nation's largest sunflower seed marketer, whose slogan is "Eat. Spit. Be Happy."

Maybe it's just great expectorations, but she says there will be an abundance of seeds no later than October -- in time for the World Series. Meanwhile, David, which supplies Major League Baseball with freebie seeds, is cutting back on its usual varieties to avoid running out.

"Our intent is to keep our customers in stock on the core David items -- the best-selling sizes and flavors, like the 'Original,' the 'Bar-B-Q' and the 'Ranch' flavor seeds," Heyman says. David's new travel cup, designed to serve as a spittoon for shells, is still in the lineup, she adds. "The tag line on that is 'spit responsibly.' "

How sunflower seeds teamed up with baseball isn't clear. Frederick C. Klein says sunflower seeds are a country thing and baseball is a country game.