Manny Machado In Best Shape Of His Life After Making A Crazy Diet Change
As you know, I’m a gigantic Manny Machado fan. Dog is named after him, I was at his first game, have many a Manny Machado memorabilia. I’ll pretty much stick up for him regardless of what the situation is, except his acts against the Athletics a few years ago. But what he said in an interview with Jerry Crasnick of ESPN really hurt me.
In his interview, Machado talked about how his switch from third base to shortstop isn’t a money move. He says his value is already established, which I agree. Everyone knows he’s a top 3 guy at the hot corner, and we’ve seen flashes of him playing short, the position he played throughout high school and in the minors. No one is going to give him more money because he moved over, we know how good he is. He mentioned in the interview that he is feeling a lot better physically. He credit’s this to a diet change. One of these changes is something that I would not be able to make.
“I love pizza and McDonald’s,” he said. “Chicken nuggets and a large fries — that’s my thing. For a while I would drive past a McDonald’s and I’d want to stop. But once you change your eating habits and put the right things in your body, you don’t even crave it anymore.
“Are you going to put cheap gas in your Lamborghini? I feel like I’m a Rolls-Royce or a Lamborghini — whichever one. It doesn’t matter. It’s an expensive car, and you’re not going to put something cheap in there. Once you put the good stuff in there, you can’t go back.”
Machado announced that he totally cut out McDonald’s chicken nuggets and pizzas from his diet and this year has cut his body fat from 14% to 10%. If we’re being honest, what is the difference between 14% body fat and 10%? Go ahead and eat those nuggets with buffalo sauce, my dude. Kind of a crazy move by Manny. Cutting pizza, I can deal with that. After a while, all pizza tastes the same anyways. The nuggets though, that is my bugaboo. No chance in hell I’d be able to give up nuggets. I can easily put down 25-30 in a sitting, maybe 40 if I have a good buffalo sauce with it. So props to Manny for not stopping at every McDonalds he sees.
This isn’t like Lendale White cutting out Tequila and dropping 30 pounds, or C.C. Sabathia throwing away all of his Cap’n Crunch and losing 25 pounds. I mean Manny isn’t even in bad shape, but if you compare yourself to a Lambo or Rolls Royce, I guess you can’t have mechanically separated & processed chicken in your system.
Now its no coincidence that this article about Machado being in absolute great shape and feeling so good physically comes less than 2 weeks before Opening Day. I’m not sure if this is known, but Machado is in the last year of his deal. He’s going to get paid in about 8 months, so this doesn’t surprise me that something like this comes out now. And if we’re being honest, this is a good thing for the Orioles. They should have traded him months ago, but didn’t. So now he’s here until the All Star break most likely, need him in tip top shape, have a monster first half, and say our goodbyes at the deadline.
I just keep imagining him having a god awful first half, and he relapses on nuggets and pizza and ends up looking like White Goodman at the end of “Dodgeball”.