June 19: Doing Better At The Ballpark

As a pretty dedicated baseball fan who happens to be paid to write about it, I spend a fair portion (probably an average of two days a week) at the ballpark. Before this season I bought a scorebook with room for 26 games in it. I've already filled that scorebook, used the spare pages from an old one, bought a scorecard and gone a couple of games without keeping score. That's 31 days at various ballparks since March.

Unfortunately, eating well at the ballpark is a real challenge. Most of the foods you think about when you go to the ballpark are things that would kill you if you ate them every day (and you'd die ridiculously in debt from paying for them, too).

So my task for yesterday, as I headed down to Milwaukee to watch the Brewers and Blue Jays, was to find a way to eat a little better on a game day. Sadly, it didn't go very well.

The Brewers do have a pretty nice stadium map showing where you can find various food throughout the ballpark. What they don't have is many stands serving interesting healthy food. You can grab a premade wrap or sandwich or a Caesar salad at the "Grab and Go" stand or...you can wander around the ballpark for a long time lamenting the lack of healthy options, I guess.

After pursuing the latter option for a while, I finally settled for the most uninteresting grilled chicken sandwich I've ever had in my life. It consisted of:

• A white hamburger bun.
• A piece of chicken.

That's it. Now, you're probably not thinking "Yeah, I'd pay $6.75 for that." I did, but I won't again. And you may not be surprised to note that after eating a piece of chicken on processed white bread, I was still hungry. So I wandered for a while again, got disappointed by the options again, grabbed a bag of peanuts and went to my seat.

As I was opening the bag of peanuts, I noticed something that surprised me. The 8 oz bag of peanuts contains six "servings," and each one contains 14 grams of fat. That single bag of peanuts, by itself, contains over 130% of your recommended daily allowance of fat. I ate about a third of the bag at the park last night and this morning I'm throwing the rest out.

It's worth noting that Miller Park has a pretty lenient carry-in policy. The people around me during the game last night certainly took advantage of the ability to bring in Subway, bags of chips, bottles of water and whatnot. It looks like that's more or less the facility's only viable healthy option.

Did I exercise today? Yes, I ran 1.6 miles. Running outside in June is proving to be a real issue. I'm working on finding ways to adjust my schedule to run at better times.