Baseball manager Casey Stengel once defended his hard-drinking players this way:

“They say some of my stars drink whiskey, but I have found that the ones who drink milkshakes don’t win any ballgames.”

That was passed off as a joke back then. Today? No manager in his right mind, except maybe Ozzie Guillen, would dare utter something so politically incorrect.

St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Josh Hancock’s drunken driving death has produced all the requisite symbolic reaction you might expect. Black patches on teammates’ uniforms, eulogies tempered with thin references to temperance, even a ban on clubhouse booze.

The Cardinals have yanked alcohol from their locker room. For a big league baseball team, that’s akin to a church outsourcing communion.

More than in any other sport, boozing is in baseball’s DNA, going back to when the game was first played by social clubs rife with roughhewn immigrants who would have worked Wally the Beerman to death inside of 10 minutes.

The romantic notion that ballplayers were at their best when they lived the high life persisted well into the 20th century.

Mickey Mantle’s greatness was owed in large part to fans’ perception: Any guy who sees three baseballs coming at him and can smash the real one just has to be a superstar.

A handful of major league teams have banned alcohol in their clubhouses, but this is little more than disingenuous window dressing.

Consider the irony involving the Cardinals’ ban:

The team was built upon the nation’s largest brewery, Anheuser-Busch; its stadium bears the company name; and its manager Tony La Russa, who had a heart-to-heart talk with Hancock about his night-lifestyle just days before his death, is himself facing drunken driving charges.

The good news in all this is that carousing behavior isn’t nearly as prevalent in the game as it once was. There’s too much money involved, too much at stake for players who don’t want to give away their edge to a bottle.

Baseball is a corporate business, albeit perhaps the only one in America that not only allows drinking in the workplace, but the boss stocks the fridge.

And for those who partake responsibly, there’s something to be said for the effects a few communal cold ones can have on team camaraderie.

In 1991, Texas Rangers manager Bobby Valentine opted to remove beer from the clubhouse.