And in FJM Heaven, HatGuy writes about food for an entire column, every column.
Gentle readers, welcome to heaven.
No more candy cane lane? Say it ain't so, Joe!
Yankees manager goes too far by banning goodies in the clubhouse
This is just a delight. I mean, I'm not even going to be an asshole for this one. Okay, maybe a little.
If Braveheart
-- topical --
were playing for the Yankees in 2008 instead of the underdog Scottish Nationalists in 1305, he’d have climbed on a table in the Yankees clubhouse and delivered a line that would resonate through time: “You can take my life, but you can’t take my Reese's peanut butter cups!”
All of you readers who e-mail me to add the "food metaphors" label on every single post I write, this post is for you. You are legion, you are persistent, and I appreciate every e-mail.
HatGuy, Jesus...he's not even veiling his gustatory fascination with the aforementioned food metaphors anymore. This baseball column is just straight up about food. Think about that. Also, countdown until he mentions ice cream. 5...4...3...
Alas, there is no William Wallace on the Yankees and no plans for Mel Gibson to play the brave rebel who leads the team against manager Joe Girardi, who has imposed a reign of health food on his team.
No Mel Gibson joke? You disappoint me, HatGuy. Hell, "sugar tits" even has a food in it. You definitely could have awkwardly shoehorned a dated, unfunny Gibson reference in there. Next time.
No candy in the clubhouse, Girardi has decreed. And no ice cream.
There it is. For the uninitiated, I refer you to what reader Zac once wrote us:
June 28, 2006, Mike Celizic writes "Sox Fans must boo Pedro heartily," and makes a choppy, hot fudge sundae/whipped cream joke:
"If anything else happens — the fans cheering wildly or the commentators congratulating them for booing boisterously or no one taking notice of the occasion at all...[I'd] be as disappointed as I’d be if I set out to construct a hot fudge sundae and discovered I was out of whipped cream."
July 7, 2006, Mike Celizic writes "Not Time for Yankees to Panic" and makes eerily similar whipped cream reference:
"It’s hard to make panic seem banal, but that’s what the Yankees have accomplished over the years... [blahblah] ...Panic should be saved for special occasions. For the Yankees, a day without panic is like a hot fudge sundae without whipped cream."
Yes, HatGuy -- we keep track of food metaphors and similes you made nearly two years ago. That is the kind of people we are. Food metaphor enthusiasts.
It’s not just at Yankee Stadium, either. By Girardi’s orders, stadiums the Yankees will visit this year have been asked not to provide M&Ms, Dove bars, or any other sweet succulence to his Yankees.
Forget FJM Heaven. This is HatGuy Heaven! The Yankees, food, sweet food, creamy food, chocolate, dessert, Yankee stadium, candy, ice cream, Dove bars (ice cream inside candy)!
Instead, Girardi wants granola, nuts and dried fruits for his players to snack on. My guess is there won’t even be salt on the nuts.
d:(
(That's a HatGuy frowny-face.)
It makes you wonder why he doesn’t go all the way and ban apple pie and motherhood.
Because he wants his players not to eat junk food? Multi-million-dollar athletes whose bodies are finely-tuned machines designed to perform extraordinary physical tasks on an everyday basis? Yes, this man is Stalin because he doesn't want his players looking like this:
I understand his motivation — promoting healthy choices in all things. But no chocolate? No nougat and caramel? No Heath bars? Not even a roll of LifeSavers?
How many times do you think HatGuy stopped to eat something while writing this column? Fifteen? Twenty? I'm guessing he ate at least one of each and every food he mentions.
Girardi came to the Yankees with a reputation as something of an extremist, but this is ridiculous. We’re talking about grown men here. We’re talking about a freaking Reese's peanut butter cup.
Well, to be fair, you were the one who brought up the peanut butter cup.
It wasn’t that long ago — within the past 20 years — that baseball clubhouses were among the last refuges from a world that was becoming obsessed with inflicting “healthy” living on everyone — by law if necessary.
Yes, 'twas a fine time. The baseball men would laze about, drunk on molasses moonshine, cheeks puffed with tobacco crabgrass. No coloreds were allowed, and the only women were the Lace Tutu Girls, whose sole purpose was to light your cigar and freshen your martini -- toplessly, of course. Ah, 1988.
Once upon a time, players arriving for work could load up on free chewing and spit tobacco to get the nicotine that kept their engines running.
People say a lot of things about baseball. But one thing I think just doesn't get enough play is that it doesn't have enough mouth cancer.
Next to the tobacco was a rack of gum and candy. Coffee urns dispensed a brew so strong you felt you could slice it and eat it in a sandwich.
Food...metaphor? No. Yes. No, wait. No. Brain twisting...screw it, I'm adding the "food metaphors" label and the "liberal use of 'food metaphors' label" label. You happy, "food metaphors" label crazies? You're welcome.
Out of sight from the public but no less readily available were amphetamines — “greenies” — for those who needed to kick-start their games.
So you're pro-greenies? What? I'm lost.
When their work was done, the tired heroes foraged through a postgame buffet that included at least three items from the all-important grease food group. Coolers harbored all manner of soda pop and enough beer in the players’ favorite brands — Free and Free Lite — to get a fraternity house through rush week.
Yeah. That's partly why I bet a team of modern players would kick these lard-assy gentlemanly layabouts' asses. Just a guess.
Except Wade Boggs. Dude would drink 70 beers on a cross-country flight and still go 3 for 5.
It wasn’t something that the American Heart Association (or your mom) was going to endorse, but when you threw in the magazine collection — heavy on hunting, cars and women who had forgotten to bring their clothing to their photo shoots – it wasn’t surprising that ballplayers liked to get to the park early and stay later than absolutely necessary. Clubhouse life was as good as it got.
HatGuy's new rallying cry: Bring back Car & Driver & Porn & Guns magazine!
And then the health police started getting involved.
I think HatGuy is confused. You can still eat all of these things. Relax. Breathe deeply. Look in your pantry. They're still there. All of them: the Three Musketeers, the Butterfingers, the Snickers, the Milky Way Darks. Now look in your freezer. See the ice cream? Yep, it's still there. Hey, here's an idea: what if you crumbled up some of those candy bars on top of the ice cream? That's good, isn't it?
Now isn't that more fun than writing a column about there being no chocolate in the Yankees' clubhouse? Aw, he fell asleep. The little HatGuy's all tuckered out. Isn't that cute?
The first thing to go was free tobacco for reasons that should be obvious. Then teams started to get more healthy choices in the buffets. In some clubhouses the beer also disappeared.
There were good reasons for all of the decisions. Tobacco can kill you, and so can excesses of grease.
Or chocolate. Or -- gasp -- hot fudge sundaes with whipped cream. It's all fun and games when you're just making metaphors about sundaes, but when those metaphors become reality, it's your arteries that pay.
And if a player were to get drunk in the clubhouse and then get in an accident, the team could face heavy liability.
Or if a Hall of Fame-bound manager were to get drunk and then drive his SUV out into the middle of an intersection and fall asleep at the wheel, I guess that would be a pretty huge deal, right? Oh, wait -- it turns out no one cares.
But there’s got to be a limit to this.
It’s not as if modern ballplayers are Babe Ruth wannabes who train on hot dogs, beer, cigars and babes. (Well, maybe the babes, but not the other things.) These guys work out year-round and many have nutritionists and trainers at their beck and call.
So they probably don't care that much about not scarfing down Turtles for three hours straight before the game.
Sure, you’ve got your C.C. Sabathias carrying on the weighty tradition of David Wells and other noted gourmands, but for the most part, these guys are as healthy and fit as anyone could ever want to be.
So is it that modern players are all so in shape that it doesn't matter if they eat junk in the clubhouse or that it was more fun back in the old days when all guys did was eat junk in the clubhouse?
Also, not really sure how fit Joba Chamberlain is. Maybe he's like the Kingpin and it's all solid muscle.
A Dove bar or a bag of M&Ms is not going to hurt them, and it just might make them feel better — and therefore perform better.
Oh, I get it. It's neither. It's that Chocolate Makes People Better At Things! You think the chocolate lobby has gotten to HatGuy? Look, we've all been tempted by the money Big Chocolate throws at us, but I've always thought of HatGuy has an incorruptible lone kook-type.
Chocolate can, in fact, be very good for you. Dark chocolate is full of anti-oxidants and contains a chemical that elevates your mood.
Yarrrgggh!!! Corporate synergy -- they wrote chocolate into the storyline!
Right here is probably where HatGuy sticks in some hard scientific evidence proving that chocolate improves your WARP3 --
This is well-known at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where Harry Potter and his posse frequently were ordered to eat lots of chocolate to help them heal after a busy day battling Dementors.
Best part of an already unbelievable gold mine (of gold chocolate coins) of an article.
Chocolate isn’t junk food.
WE GET IT.
Some would argue it’s the best food nature ever contributed to our diet, a food loaded with anti-oxidants and imbued with a mood-elevating substance called theobromine, from which comes cacao’s scientific name — theobroma, the “food of the gods.” Was ever any product of nature more aptly named?
Holy f-ing s. He's really lost it, hasn't he? I'm worried. I'm honestly, no-kidding, 100% worried about Michael Celizic's mental state. Call me, Mike. Well, no. Don't do that. Just write an article about A-Rod faking his injury so he can avoid those high-pressure May at bats so I know everything's all right.
And now, just for the fun of it, I will now list each and every food (including repeats) or other consumptible (I made that word up to mean something you put in your body in a food-like manner) found in the column:
candy cane
Reese's peanut butter cups
candy
ice cream
M&Ms
Dove bars
granola
nuts
dried fruits
salt
nuts
apple pie
chocolate
nougat
caramel
Heath bars
LifeSavers
candy bar
Reese's peanut butter cup
chewing and spit tobacco
gum
candy
coffee
sandwich
greenies
buffet
grease
soda pop
beer
tobacco
beer
grease
hot dogs
beer
amino acids
vitamins
ginseng
Dove bar
bag of M&Ms
chocolate
dark chocolate
chocolate
chocolate
best food nature ever contributed to our diet
cacao
"food of the gods"
Labels: embarrassment of riches, fjm heaven, food metaphors, HatGuy, liberal use of "food metaphors" label
