For Peak Performance, Swap Pizza for Plantains
Major League Baseball fuels Latin players with dishes from home
Gregory Polanco, a hulking 27-year-old Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder from the Dominican Republic, moved to Florida to play professional baseball when he was 18. He subsisted on burgers, pizza, and scrambled eggs, and pined for his mom’s yuca, rice and beans, beef stew, and mangú, or boiled plantain.
“Food is home to me,” he said before a recent home contest against the Colorado Rockies.
The Pirates are listening. They’re part of a growing number of baseball teams emphasizing nutrition, especially for Latin players, who make up around 30 percent of all major leaguers, double the percentage three decades ago.
With technology and analytics quantifying everything on the field, nutrition is a new competitive edge. The priority is fueling peak performance and durability over a grueling 162-game season, but it’s also important to create cultural comfort that defies algorithms. Sometimes plain home cooking is best, even fried.
“Whenever I eat queso frito, I have a good game,” Polanco said.
It used to be that nobody in baseball cared about food, which clubs provide before and after games. When Pirates…
