Carlos' Corner: 'It's tough to eat right'
Baseball's odd hours present nutritional challenge
By Carlos Peña / Special to MLB.com

Carlos Peña, a 23-year-old rookie heralded as one of the top
prospects in the game, was acquired by Oakland during the offseason
in a six-player trade with Texas. He's replacing Jason Giambi as the
A's first baseman and is providing for MLB.com an exclusive daily
diary for the 2002 season.

Before Friday night's game against the Angels, Peña discussed the
difficult time he has maintaining a balanced diet during the season.

OAKLAND, Calif. -- It's not easy eating the proper foods during the
season, mainly because we our schedules are so crazy. Night games,
day game, planes, buses -- sometimes you feel like you're constantly
on the move, and when you're constantly on the move, it's difficult
to have a routine. And when you don't have a routine, one of the
things that suffers is the way you eat.

One thing I've started doing is making sure I get my proteins by
having protein shakes. Sometime after night games, when the game goes
late and I don't want to eat the greasy clubhouse food, I'll just
have a protein shake after my weight work and call it a night.

I also try to read as much about nutrition as I can, so I can
experiment with different things and see what works best for me.
Because one mistake that I think young players might make is to
forget how important a good diet is. It's easy to do, because when
you're young you can get away with not eating so great. You body,
your metabolism, is on fire. You just go, go, go, burn, burn, burn.

But if you don't pay attention to what you're putting into your body
when you're young, you develop poor eating habits. Then, when you get
older and your metabolism starts to slow down, you have these bad
habits ingrained that are even more difficult to break.

It's tough to eat right, but you really have to try. And not just for
healthy baseball, but for healthy life. I think nutrition is just as
important as your workouts, because think about it: You can do all
the crunches and sit-ups you want, but if you're not eating right,
you're never going to get those "six-pack" ab muscles that you're
doing the crunches for in the first place.

If I was a better cook, I'd probably cook for myself a lot more. But
I'm a terrible cook, so I seldom do it. I'm terrible.

Once in Single-A, my roommate and I decided to cook for ourselves.
Set the table and everything. We cooked for an hour or more, and
everything looked great. But when we sat down to eat ... the first
bite, it was OK. Then we take a second bite ... silence. By the third
bite, we were both like, "This is brutal." I messed up the beans, I
messed up the chicken. I think we ended up eating out that night.

Cooking takes too much time for me, too. Because I'm so bad, I have
to be very, very careful about what I'm doing. So it ends up taking
me an hour and a half to cook a meal, and it only takes a half-hour
to eat it.

I'd rather go to a restaurant and eat for an hour and a half.

Carlos Peña's diary appears as told to Mychael Urban, who covers the
Oakland A's for MLB.com.