Hey, if you're a Phillie, you never know what can make the difference in the postseason.
It might be a clutch home run by a 40-year-old guy with a gut. Or, you know, it might be a little honey on your tuna-fish sandwich.
That's what Ryan Howard eats on game day, according to team cook Joe Swanhart. "That's just the way he likes it," Swanhart says.
It might be peanut butter and jelly, the sandwich of champions for Chase Utley and So Taguchi.
"Smuckers strawberry is actually Chase's favorite," says Swanhart, who explains Utley's pregame preference as a combination of superstition and habit. Maybe dating back to his Little League days? But Taguchi? Do Little Leagers in Japan eat PB&J?
Perhaps it just might be that extremely popular cappucino machine the team purchased at the beginning of September that has made the difference. Fired up on espresso, the Phillies went on a late-season tear.
Swanhart, who is called "Swanny" by everyone in baseball but Joe everywhere else, is himself a young phenom. He rose from spring training batboy for St. Louis at age 12 to overseeing game-day meals for the Phillies at just 29.
Swanny oversees the team kitchen, which features a shockingly low-fat, low-junk, low-fried, egg-whites, almost-no-red-meat diet for players to the point of offering only baked potato chips, not regular.
This is definitely not 1993. Can you imagine John Kruk eating baked, no-trans-fat Lays?
In any case, Swanny has a dossier on every player's eating habits, a series of elaborate food rituals that may or may not have powered this team to its World Series berth. On game days, he's serving up three meals in the players' lounge: on arrival, post-batting practice, and postgame.
Naturally, closer Brad Lidge is the biggest pregame eater, which would make sense since Lidge knows he's got until the eighth or ninth inning to digest.
Swanhart says Lidge likes to lay on the hot sauce, logical given Lidge's ability to be cool in high-pressure situations. See, this is guy who can handle the heat.
Two seasons ago, the club hired a nutritionist to overhaul the team diet. Now, this might sound like a competitive advantage, except that Tampa Bay, where Swanny used to work, hired the same nutritionist, Cynthia Sass.
"We're all healthy now," says Swanhart. "Healthy-choice bacon, turkey-sausage links, egg whites. We don't do a lot of candy and fatty foods."
