The Dodgers took a chance in last year’s draft on a college player who was undrafted out of high school but worked his way up to the fourth round in three years. He’s a testament to what a talented athlete can do with the right tools to help him learn to take better care of his conditioning, from learning to eat better to working harder in the training room, and how some progressive MLB teams are helping their prospects do just that.
Advertisement
Brandon Lewis was undrafted out of high school in 2016, perhaps for good reason. He was a good hitter, but his conditioning wasn’t ready for pro ball; it wasn’t clear to scouts that he had any place to play. His journey from there to the draft in 2019 involved a trip through junior college, one season at UC-Irvine, and a massive change in how he ate and took care of himself, bringing himself down to about 220 pounds when draft day arrived in 2019. It earned him a $372,500 bonus from the Dodgers in the fourth round last year, a massive change from his non-prospect status three years earlier.
“I weighed 285 when I finished high school,” Lewis said to me in a conversation in early April. “I was still a good athlete and ballplayer, but obviously I was limited. I was a two-way player, starting pitcher and a first baseman. I always had goals to play third base because I knew I could do it better than some kids, so I mentioned it to my coach and he pretty much shot me down, saying with my size, I was so limited to first base. I knew if I wanted to play third I had to get in shape.”
The path to getting into better shape ran through Los Angeles Pierce College, a two-year school that has produced several major leaguers, including Doug Decinces and Coco Crisp. Lewis knew his conditioning wasn’t good enough for Division 1 recruiters to come after him, and at L.A. Pierce, he played for a coach he’d known for years and worked with a strength and conditioning coach he described as “very tough.” That was James Sims, now the head football coach at the school. (Sims didn’t respond to requests for comment.) “He was the kickstarter for me, what started to get all the baby fat off, all that working out during practice. He did not go easy on us.”
Lewis also says that changing his diet was a huge part of getting in better shape, especially because he had so much to learn about how best to feed himself as an athlete. “I was just out of high school, I didn’t know much about how to eat and how to work out. I wasn’t a big drive-thru guy myself; I had three other siblings, that was sometimes the best way to feed all of us, a simple cheap meal. Once I was there (at Pierce), I met my teammates, and a couple were big into health and fitness. I’d talk to them every day about what I was looking to do and they’d help me out.”
Advertisement
He started with the basics, but ran into the same trouble a lot of novice cooks hit as they’re first learning. “My buddies tried to write up some meal plans and stuff. A lot didn’t fit into what food I actually liked,” he says. “I was cooking a lot of chicken and a little bit of rice; I knew it wasn’t bad for me, and I was doing it to better myself, but it got boring after a while. Now I’m starting to like fish a lot more. I hated it growing up, but now I can eat salmon, sea bass, or halibut. I never really had a problem with fruits or vegetables, but I’m starting to eat more uncommon vegetables. I never grew up around zucchini or squash, for example.”
Lewis especially credits the Dodgers’ staff with helping him continue to learn to cook for himself and also to help feed all of their minor league players when they’re at the stadium. “They cater to us really well in the Dodgers organization. Every affiliate has a chef and they cook for you. Everything’s pre-approved from our performance staff, all stuff that’s going to make me recover better. And a lot of our staffs are really informed about food and they’ll answer questions.”
He also cites the Dodgers’ performance chefs, Tyrone Hall and Kristen DeCesare, for their help in preparing two meals a day for players who train at the stadium and talking to players about cooking and nutrition. “I think we’re in a very fortunate place in our kitchen,” says Hall, who, like Kristen, is a registered dietitian. “Having two of us gives us insight on the functionality of food and food that tastes good, how the best nutrition is nutrition that they’re going to eat.
“We start from good whole foods as our approach. We use proteins on the leaner side, and good green vegetables freshly cooked. We try to keep carbs as clean as possible. There’s not a lot of dairy or cheese or excess fats. It works for guys on lower-calorie plans trying to lose weight, and we work on portion size from there. If you have guys who need to gain weight, we use healthy fats and complex carbohydrates.”
Hall also explained how they try to teach players how to eat better when away from the park, and even provide some lessons in core cooking skills. “If they’re around in the kitchen, we show them what to do – like how to butcher and skin a whole side of salmon – and we’ve started putting together our favorite recipes in a packet, so when people ask for the roasted Brussels sprouts and bourbon chicken and shrimp scampi and grilled salmon, they can learn those.” (Asked what cookbooks he likes, Hall, who mentioned he has quite a few at home, cited J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Food Lab, Stella Parks’ Brave Tart, and Samin Nosrat’s Salt Fat Acid Heat, all of which take a science-based approach to cooking).
Advertisement
The individual attention and education Lewis cited is part of an overall plan for the Dodgers’ player development system, according to Dodgers President of Baseball Operations Andrew Friedman. “Our organizational goal is to have an individualized approach in all aspects of player development. Proper nutrition is a major point of emphasis across all of our teams, and we understand that each player will require a different meal plan to best fuel their body,” Friedman said. “We feel this sometimes undervalued piece is a big component of our players performing at their highest level throughout the season.”
The Dodgers were one of the first teams to take this holistic approach to player development, a paradigm shift in an industry that long thought minor leaguers should fend for themselves when away from the park but would act surprised when players relied on fast food for sustenance, although since then more teams have adopted programs built around improving nutrition for their minor leaguers.
Lewis still faces somewhat long odds to get to the big leagues, even with his commitment to conditioning, but one thing that helps his case is that the Dodgers have tried him out at third base, the position he’d wanted to play back in high school and his primary position last spring at UC-Irvine. He has plus power, finishing sixth in the Pioneer League in home runs despite playing only 32 games at the level (less than half a season). He also has some length to his swing, and will have to show more patience at the plate than he did in college or in his brief time in the minors last summer. But his chances are far better now with his new build and the potential for him to play somewhere beyond first base.
(Top photo: Four Seam Images via AP)
