I Ate Like An LA Dodger for 24 Hours

Ladies and gentlemen, it is baseball season and I cannot go anywhere without seeing the paraphernalia of my city's team, the L.A. Dodgers. Admittedly, after moving here over three years ago, I know very little about the team and about baseball in general. So I've challenged myself to step into the shoes of this beloved team, eating like the L.A. Dodgers for 24 hours, learning from the experts, and even doing a little bit of training. Will this noodle-armed L.A. transplant come out a Dodgers superfan and survive this insane level of protein intake? Let's get started and find out. Also, for anyone wondering why we're not filming at the actual Dodgers stadium despite being in L.A., I did reach out, but I sadly declined. So we're doing our best here at The Tasty Studios. We have to start our day with the breakfast of champions. We're getting a good balance of some carbs and some protein with a delicious overnight oats. This is very easy to meal prep if you wanna get this set up for your week. We're gonna start out by mashing a banana. I'm adding some blueberries next to my oats, adding some chia seeds for some fiber. And people say this helps with hydration. And an easy way to get more protein in your overnight oats is to actually hydrate all of it with protein shake. It just adds also a little flavor and sweetness too. In doing a lot of the research for this video, I found that athletes often eat quite simply. This looks nice and mashed up. So we'll let this hydrate, even though obviously the one I'm gonna eat was prepped overnight. While doing research for this video, I actually found that the American Dietic Association suggests that baseball players in particular have two to three grams of carb per pound of body weight per player and 0.5 to 0.8 grams of protein. So that's how we're informing my portion size for this video, but you can apply that to your own life if you're trying to be a professional MLB player. To meet that, we're gonna also supplement our breakfast with a delicious simple scrambled eggs. And I'm using just two eggs. My parents told me you always add a little splash of milk or even some water to your scrambled eggs because it helps it get all nice and fluffy. I've also seen a lot of people add cottage cheese or ricotta and cottage cheese is a really easy way to get more protein in your scrambled eggs as well. So to supplement my eggs with some more carbs, we're adding some sprouted multigrain toast. And then we have our fully hydrated overnight oats that were in the fridge. Ooh, that looks really good. Anyways, add some toppings on top. Really good. This is not too dissimilar from what I normally eat, but it's a lot. For any daughters newbies like me, I did not realize that the Dodgers actually originally came from Brooklyn. So the Dodgers weren't actually in LA until 1958. And the name Dodgers originates from the stadium where they played in Brooklyn. Apparently, there are a ton of trolleys that would always threaten to hit viewers and spectators as they were coming to the stadium. So they called them the Dodgers because viewers were the trolley Dodgers. As I mentioned earlier, these meals, I'm not just making it myself. I did consult with our research team and also got to chat with an amazing pro athlete trainer who has worked with MLB athletes specifically for both training and also building diet plans oftentimes. So I got to chat with him and actually get a pretty decent sense of how these athletes are fueling themselves, both while training at home in the off season and being on the road for many, many, many games. The main thing about nutrition is really just consistency. So eating a very well-balanced meal is kind of what we're always looking for for athletes, right? So we always want some type of good, nutritious, hearty carbohydrate. We want some type of lean protein. And then, you know, we can mix in some greens or some healthy fats. And the main thing is that nutrition is fuel, right? The food we're putting in, we're gonna use. So we want whole, nutritious, good forms of these macronutrients. Especially for a baseball player, their schedule is so demanding. They play games back to back to back. They travel. They're in the weight room. They're running up for the game. It's a long day. So they have to be fueling constantly. It is time for lunch. Upon talking to a lot of experts, it does sound like athlete meals can get kind of boring and repetitive. It could be a lot of chicken breasts, brown rice, steamed broccoli type of situation. So we decided to incorporate a lot of those different elements of the meals, but with something that feels very LA-coded, and that would be a sweet green Harvest Bowl. This is a really easy recipe also to meal prep in bulk. We will have links to recipes in the description. On just one sheet pan, you can kind of throw everything. I have some broccoli, sweet potatoes, my favorite part of the Harvest Bowl. And then we have our chicken breast. Gonna drizzle my veggies with some avocado oil, garlic powder, just like a pinch of salt. For our chicken, we also are giving it a nice little rub of avocado oil. And we're seasoning it with this little umami spice blend. Rub it on in there. And we're just gonna throw this in the oven. So as you can see, all my ingredients are here. They're ready to assemble into my little Harvest Bowl. Our bed is of kale, lots of rich vitamins and nutrients in this dark leafy green. Got our roasted chicken out of the oven. Our sweet potatoes, broccoli, some cut up apples, some goat cheese, some roasted almonds. Finally, our dressing. This is actually comical to look at because look at this. This is insane. Clearly, I don't have the muscle mass or density to require this much food, but this actually does look really delicious. Mm. This really does taste pretty much just like their bowl, but obviously beefed up with a lot more protein. I almost feel like baseball kind of has a bad reputation for being a less athletic sport, just with the amount of downtime that players have during a game. And also I think just like the physique of baseball players probably not looking like how people imagine Greek Olympians looking all the time. But I actually learned it's one of the most challenging sports to play professionally in the world. They play the most games during a season with 162 games per team over the course of six months. So it's really, really demanding on everyone's bodies because they don't have that rest time in between that a lot of other professional sports teams have. Can you believe it, guys? It hasn't even been a couple of hours and we're already eating and cooking again. I can see why players need their private chefs because otherwise they'd have no time to practice. They'd be in the kitchen all day. Yes, players have very different diets and plans depending on what time of the year it is. But we decided to base ours off of an in-season diet. So right now we're about to have our pregame meal. Our pregame meal today is going to be a turkey marinara brown rice pasta. A lot of pregame meals, I learned, tend to be a little bit more carb heavy to help players fuel up, obviously, for spending a lot of energy. So I'm going to start off with heating up my skillet and we're going to make the sauce here with some onions. And we're actually going to add our veggies right into the sauce. We're just using some shredded zucchini, some garlic. And now that our zucchini is looking really wilty and smelling so good, the protein for our sauce is this ground turkey. And I'm seasoning that with some Italian seasoning, red pepper flakes, a generous pinch of salt. Once our turkey is looking a little bit browned and starting to be cooked through, just going to add some sugar-free marinara and simmer it all together. I actually had the chance to speak briefly with a former MLB player. And he was telling me that players eat so much on game days, particularly because they're not just playing the game. They're getting to the stadium early for a warmup, for a practice, which is when they would probably have this larger, carbier pregame meal. Let that digest. And then chances are right before the game, they're eating another smaller pregame snack that could be like a banana or a protein bar, something to give them a little extra carbs without feeling weighed down. Now, let's be real. I don't have the stomach capacity to eat this and another snack, but just imagine with your mind's eye that MLB players are eating a lot of food. For our pasta, I'm using some brown rice pasta. One other fun fact I learned was that some athletes, when they get started, they actually do hydration training where they train their bodies to drink a certain amount of water and have a schedule and regimen for when they're drinking to make sure that they don't dehydrate when they need to perform. This looks and smells so good. Man, I can't get over how much food there is in this video. And this isn't even as much as these professional athletes are actually eating. I was scared the brown rice pasta was gonna be horrible. Admittedly, I don't think I've had it before. Very nice texture. I actually don't mind it. I may not be playing in an actual Dodgers game today, but we did think it'd be fun for me to try some of the exercises that professional MLB players do do on a training basis. So we asked Nick, our pro trainer, put me through the test. See if I can handle some of the training regimen for a Dodger. I know you train a really big range of athletes. Are there any things that you notice that are really different about MLB players versus athletes of a different sport? What we're really trying to do is narrow down, you know, what are the specific demands that they need for their sport? And typically the injuries that they encounter. And that's where we start to program. So we look at those things. That's at the forefront of the exercises that we're designing for them. Their body's their moneymaker. So it's our job to make sure that they're recovering, training appropriately, and, you know, getting ready for season. Oh, I'll do that. We are done with our one hour of training. And I'm so tired. Based off that training footage, clearly I too am ready for my $700 million contract with the Dodgers. But speaking of $700 million, our post-game and final meal of this video had to pay homage to LA's hero, bias, man of the hour, Shohei Otani. Shohei captured the heart of the city ever since he joined the team in 2023. But he's originally from Mizusawa, Oshu, Japan. Apparently one of his favorites is takoyaki, which is a common Japanese street food. It's a little seafood pancake ball. We're gonna attempt to make that. And now for our takoyaki, we're starting off with the batter. For our batter, we're just using some cake flour, an egg. This is dashi stock powder, which is really common in a lot of Korean and Japanese cooking. It adds like that delicious umami flavor. And some water. Nice. So we have our batter ready and I'm just gonna spray my pan. For the takoyaki, it often requires, of course, taco, the octopus. We have some green onions and some pickled ginger. Tempura flakes. I feel like it's cooking before I even have the chance to add everything. Another layer of batter. You're just supposed to use little chopsticks or like skewers to flip them. And pray this works well, this is my second time ever making this dish. These are so ugly, I hope Shohei never sees them. But for anyone who's curious about Shohei's debut in the MLB, he actually came to be part of the Anaheim Angels in 2017. So he made a name for himself for being able to both pitch and bat, which apparently made him the first full-time two-way player in the league in almost a century. Now we're gonna plate these. Any round food, kind of adorable. I have some takoyaki sauce. This stuff is so good. Some Kewpie mayo, got some seaweed powder, an onion, bonito flakes. If it's hot enough, they should dance on top a little bit. If this is gonna be our post-game meal after a very demanding workout and tiring day, I decided to get some of Shohei's other favorites. In an interview, he said that one of his favorite American fast foods is In-N-Out. He's also been known to say that he's a huge meat lover, so checks out. We got a nice little beef cheeseburger and some well-done fries. We also got some of his other favorite Japanese snacks. He loves Japanese potato chips. Got a few flavors, of course, including some steak flavor. And then I also saw an interview where someone said that this Poifu candy is one of his favorites. I know that recovery meals tend to be a bigger, well-rounded meal. This may not be as well-rounded, but I did ask trainer Nick his thoughts on cheap meals for athletes. Having a little fun meal every now and then isn't gonna totally throw you off track, so cheers, y'all. Mm, delightful. The freshness from the green onion and the ginger really cuts through. I feel like it helps because it's a lot of starch in your mouth at once. I swear, anything seasoned with dashi powder is gonna taste so good. Home run of a meal, ha ha ha ha ha. I'm really excited about these potato chips. It really does taste like a marinated steak. Something about Asian snacks, in my humble opinion, will always hit different. And finally, our little sweet treat is going to be this Poifu candy. Oh my gosh, it's like a jelly bean, but it's actually chewy inside, like a little gummy. That is so delicious. It's very fruity. Wait, this might become one of my favorites, too. This has been way more food than I normally want to eat for myself, but I had so much fun researching the Dodgers that, okay, I don't know if I'm a Dodgers stan, but I'm a Shohei stan after making this video. I would love for his dog, Decoy, to become the official mascot of the team. Hope you enjoyed, too, and learned a lot about the Dodgers, about training and fueling yourself as an athlete. If you have any other suggestions for who else I should eat like for 24 hours, let me know in the comments down below, and we'll see you in the next one. Bye!