In Singapore, residents are caned for doing it. In his early days, Ozzy Osbourne would fill a bucket of it and drink it.

The topic is spit.

Game One of the World Series and spit is in the air. Literally. On Sunday night, game seven of the American League Championship, Matt Garza spit so much he looked like a ship’s maidenhead in heavy seas. To be fair, J.D. Drew had some impressive production as well.

The average healthy mouth produces about 600 milliliters of saliva each day, an estimated 25,000 quarts in a lifetime. Visualize: about a 20-ounce soda bottle’s worth in a day; more than a swimming pool’s worth in a lifetime. Most of the time, it enjoys a low profile, quietly solubilizing dry food, initiating starch digestion and generally lubricating.

Unique among American sportsmen, baseball players bring it front and center. Football and hockey players may just be stymied by mouth guards; soccer and basketball players could be parched from near-constant running. Baseball players’ cups runneth over.

Maureen Groer, the Gordon Keller professor at the USF’s College of Nursing, and Kristen Salomon, social psychology professor at USF, study spit. They are currently at work on a study of Hillsborough County police officers, analyzing saliva in stress tests. In Groer’s experience, there’s great variation in flow rate.

“Emotions can impact the flow. When people are stressed, they usually have a dry mouth. I don’t know much about the culture of baseball, but they can’t be making that much spit without chewing tobacco, sunflower seeds or gum.”

Mark Rose, a former Yankees pitching coach and owner of Mark Rose Sports Academy in Tampa, gives a little bit of history.

“Baseball came from farms and fields in small-town America. They were farmers, and smokeless tobacco was part of the fabric of their lives. I believe it was in 1992 that we were told in the minors that smokeless tobacco was prohibited on the field during games and that the umpires were to enforce that with a warning and then an ejection,” he remembers.  “It was coming down from Major League Baseball, the thought being that if we outlawed chew at the minor league level, eventually the players in the majors would not be chewing and thus present a more wholesome image to kids.”

“It worked. But because there’s a lot of standing in baseball and people were in the habit of doing something, they replaced smokeless tobacco with bubble gum and sunflower seeds. Players don’t think [spitting] is gross. It’s just habit, a way to calm yourself.”

But maybe it’s more than that. Like old Pavlov’s dogs, this salivation might be a conditional reflex, an anticipatory response triggered by the prospect of victory.

Because really, the Rays are just spitting distance from glory.