nosh nook #195 - sunday, december 13, 2009

baseball's war against hamburgers (link)
12.11.09 - wall street journal - by david biderman

batter up, bitchez! with only 67 days left until pitchers & catchers report to spring training & the baseball season officially gets under way, it's time for us to start getting excited so that by the time that the regular season starts on april 4th, we won't be able to contain ourselves. i'm an avid red sox fan & since last year didn't work out for us, i'm already intensely following baseball's winter meetings & off-season trade activity, hoping to see the red sox improve. so far, i have not been impressed. i guess they still have 67 days left to do something so i shouldn't rush them, but other teams are already busy improving themselves & i'm not just talking about big free agent signings & trades. i'm talking about MAJOR CLUBHOUSE FOOD OVERHAUL!

when many of the teams return for the 2010 season, they're going to notice some big changes in the clubhouse. according to the wall street journal, more so now than ever, teams are going nuts trying to fill their clubhouses with healthy food for the players & improve their diets. if you're a dodger, you get to go to arizona to attend a "six-day health-food boot camp." if you're on the phillies or rays, you may get to eat a lot of "quinona, teff and spelt" next season. good luck with that. overall, the drive for change is so strong that at the recent winter meetings, "major and minor league strength and conditioning coaches devoted 12 hours on saturday—about half of their total meeting time—to discussing matters such as including edamame and snow peas in the postgame buffet to whether teams should order 'fun size' candy bars rather than the odious regular-sized variety." that sounds like time well spent. they're probably sick of talking about steroids anyhow.

in the olden days, clubhouses would have "steak, french fries, omelettes, bacon, and at least one gigantic tub of ice cream." a few years back, you had rich garces & cecil fielder, but nowadays, baseball players are generally pretty phsyically fit, so i guess the clubhouse food overhaul is probably a side effect of the rampant steroid use. jim malone, the padres strength & conditioning coach, partially agrees. he told the journal that "more-stringent drug policies and potential problems with supplements...have forced players to be much smarter and more careful about what they put in their bodies. he also said that many younger trainers coming into baseball have been schooled in nutrition more than their older counterparts." no matter the motivation, at least teams are getting their players to eat healhy. i didn't see anything about the red sox in the article, but let's hope they're following the trend. based on their off-season action thus far, we may need all the help we can get.