Single-car accidents raise questions that beg answers. What happened? Could it have been avoided?

When the person at the wheel is a professional athlete, when the accident happens at the witching hour, the biggest question that is raised is obvious – was he drinking?

When the professional athlete is a baseball player, and the accident happens after a game, the informed question isn’t so much whether he had been drinking; it’s how much he had been drinking. That’s just the culture of the sport – time spent with teammates in the clubhouse after the game, generally with cold beer and sometimes something stronger, is almost sacred.

The reports that Cardinals reliever Josh Hancock appeared over-served on the night he drove a rented Ford Explorer into the back of a tow truck – and that he was driving a rented vehicle because his had been involved in a late-night accident earlier in the week – might add to the pain of his family.

It’s premature to reach any conclusions in advance of the toxicology reports. But you knew there might be more to this story than was reported initially because no one who had been with Hancock stepped up to say he was stone sober.

The culture of the sport suggested he had started drinking – maybe a little, maybe a lot – as soon as Saturday afternoon’s 8-1 loss to the Cubs was over. And the drinking probably started in the players’ lounge at Busch Stadium, the inner sanctum of the defending World Series champions.

This isn’t meant to point a finger at Hancock, general manager Walt Jocketty or anyone else with the Cardinals. It’s just the way things are done in baseball. The clubhouse is one of the few havens in North America where employees are permitted to drink in their workplace.

That is, unless they happen to play for the Oakland A’s. Billy Beane, as progressive of a GM as there is in baseball, banned beer from the Athletics’ clubhouse during the 2006 season. He instituted the rule shortly after pitcher Esteban Loaiza was stopped for drunken driving after leaving the clubhouse.

Ozzie Guillen, the White Sox manager, mocked the A’s for putting in the rule, which Beane explained was the result of the team’s liability concerns.

He laughed about some of his players having had their driving issues in Chicago. But there’s nothing funny when the worst possibility becomes reality.

Almost a year after Oakland took steps to help protect players from themselves, no other team has followed suit in banning alcohol from the clubhouse.

Commissioner Bud Selig was the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers when guys like Robin Yount, Paul Molitor and Pete Vukovich would unwind after games with clubhouse beers, building an esprit de corps that contributed to an American League pennant. No one discouraged the drinking – these were the Brewers, after all, and drinking was what most players did after games.

As long as MLB looks to the beer companies for major advertising dollars, the sport isn’t likely to crack down on drinking in clubhouses, or anywhere else, for that matter.

In 1991, then-manager Bobby Valentine decided to remove beer from the Texas Rangers’ home clubhouse. Players groused until Nolan Ryan and Goose Gossage prevailed upon Valentine to end the prohibition.

Valentine said he would lift the ban when the Rangers won 10 games in a row. Almost immediately they went out and won 14 in a row, which is still the franchise record.

Amazing.