Have to give credit to pal R.J. Anderson of Baseball Prospectus & Rays blog The Process Report on this one, because earlier this morning he tweeted out a link to a 2008 Tampa Bay Online interview with new Dodger reliever J.P. Howell, then with the Rays.
Among other items, such as learning about Howell’s love for sleeping late, college football video games, and Johann Sebastian Bach, we get this:
Do you eat anything specific before the games?
Yeah – PBJ and Doritos. That’s it, man. Just simple.
Every game?
Every game.
Since when?
Aw, man, it probably started because my mom used to pack it in my lunch. She packed my lunch in high school, and then college I stopped in my freshman year and got hit. So sophomore year, I said, hey, I’ve got to go back, during the season, to eating my PBJs and Doritos, man. So I did and everything’s been good.
So a major league baseball player eats the same thing before games as I did when I was 12. Good to know. While that article is of course several years old and so I of course can’t vouch for whether that’s still his custom, Howell had also completed his fourth — and arguably best — big-league season.
But here’s the real question: is “PBJs and Doritos” one item or two, man?
You’d think that it’s a sandwich with a side of chips, as CookingMisadventures.com shows here:
Delicious! But what if it’s actually Doritos in the sandwich, as you can see in this example (along with what inexplicably appear to be Fig Newtons) from Avoision.com?
That’s just un-American. Is that really the type of pitcher we want the Dodgers to have in their bullpen? Should all contracts have pre-game food clauses? Is this kind of thinking what’s ruining Juan Uribe? I’m just not sure I can support Howell until we know for sure.
(83 days until Opening Day. I’m not sure we’re going to make it.)
