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Beeston never far from ‘non-defensible’ cigar habit

“Did I mention the cigars?”

 

Talk to most anyone in and around baseball about Toronto Blue Jays President Emeritus Paul Beeston, and the conversation soon enough comes around to cigars.

Whether it’s spending an evening or an afternoon smoking one with him or simply seeing him with a well-chewed, unlit one in his mouth, a cigar is never far away from Beeston.

“And always the Montecristo No. 2s,” said Vince Wladika, referring to the famous Cuban brand of cigars. Wladika is a New Jersey-based media consultant who previously worked with Beeston at Major League Baseball.

Beeston’s love of cigars — particularly Montecristo No. 2s — runs deep.getty images

Beeston first picked up the habit in the mid-1960s working summers during his college years at an accounting firm.

“I’m 20 years old, you get to payday and you had a cigar,” he said. “It started with 5-cent cigars, then it became 10-cent cigars, and it just carried on. It was a different time back then, and later on, we’d be smoking in the office, right in the middle of doing audits or something.”

Beeston’s office cigar smoking continued once he moved from accounting to baseball, to the point he had special exhaust systems able to handle the large plumes of smoke installed in his offices both in Toronto and then in New York during his years working at the MLB central office.

When he moved to his current president emeritus role with the Blue Jays, stack upon stack of empty cigar boxes were cleaned out of his office. Beeston estimates there are still many hundreds of boxes laying around parts of Rogers Centre.

“I’m going to give them to an artist for an art installation,” he said. “You can’t even collect those boxes now. Cigar stores don’t even sell as many boxes as I have.”

Beeston is obviously aware of the health risks the cigar smoking brings, and he called it “a vile, terrible, repulsive, non-defensible habit,” even as he continues to smoke about four a day now.

But he’s also quick to point to the deep friendships in and out of baseball he forged in part through those cigars. Former MLB Commissioners Bart Giamatti, Fay Vincent and Bud Selig were each smokers at various parts of their life. And for many years, a regular tradition at quarterly MLB owners meetings was a late-night gathering that frequently involved Beeston, Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf, Boston Red Sox owner John Henry and Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim owner Arte Moreno, among others, and more than a few cigars.

It then comes as little surprise that owner group was often ideologically aligned on key issues within the game, such as the 2014 commissioner election in which the group initially backed Red Sox Chairman Tom Werner to succeed Selig before voting swayed toward Rob Manfred.

“I can’t defend it, but I can,” Beeston said of the smoking. “You talk about things like me and Jerry smoking cigars, having fun, talking, resolving all the issues of the world — that’s also part of it.”

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