Sidney Ponson Learns to Eat Smarter as His Pitching Career Takes Shape

Sidney Ponson is eating a plate of pasta scampi at Amici's in Little Italy. This is his afternoon restaurant, the place he prefers to chow down before night games.

He likes to go to Ruth's Chris for dinner when the Orioles play afternoon games, and occasionally the right-hander will scoot off to a Federal Hill diner if he's still hungry following a night game.

When it's his turn to pitch, Little Italy is where Ponson will go for his pre-game meal.

“There are good carbs [carbohydrates], and you need a lot of energy in the hot weather,” he says of the pasta scampi and Italian food in general.

Ponson knows a bit about nutrition. Before he reached the big leagues, but after the Orioles already had recognized him as a major league talent, the club sent him to Duke University in the office season. The Orioles knew that he had an invaluable right arm. They wanted to be sure he used it more to throw a baseball than to stuff his ample body with heavy fats. Duke ran a nutrition program for athletes who tend, let's say, to be a little too eager at the dinner table and a little too gifted in girth.

Ponson came back from Duke full of good habits.

He would even scoff at others for putting too much dressing on salads. A salad without dressing, he would advise, was fine, but swath that lettuce and those tomatoes with oil and Parmesan, and it's just like eating a cheese omelet, he would lecture.

On this day in Little Italy, Ponson is enjoying his scampi with a Caesar salad - a la dressing. He's reminded of his former abstemious ways.

He still is nutrition-conscious, the 225-pounder says. “I eat mainly salads and chicken. But my workout [regimen] is much better now than it used to be. I work hard, I go to the ballpark early and I lift weights. So I can eat a little differently now.”

Not everyone agrees with that assessment.

Owner Peter Angelos recently observed of his prized young pitcher, “He may need to improve his conditioning program.”

In fact, Ponson weighs less and is in better condition than he used to be. But he has had a tendency to see his effectiveness on the mound wane in late innings. Whether this is due to his physical shape, as the Orioles apparently think, or his difficulty maintaining his concentration throughout a full nine innings, is open to conjecture.

Eating correctly is like lot pitching in the big leagues - they're based in scientific theory, but there are shades of wiggle room with both. What works for one person might not work for another. And you can talk about each subject endlessly, but none of the talk matters when you actually are facing the plate - that's home plate in baseball and the dinner plate at the table.

Ponson is perceived as one of the most gifted pitchers in the big leagues. He's still only 23, but some wonder why - with his exceptional array of pitches and movement on the ball - he has yet to be consistently good. He'll pitch an outstanding game one day, and the next time out he'll get hammered. He'll be sterling for six innings and then fall apart in the sixth.

Ponson can rationalize his inconsistency on the mound, just as he can his eating habits.

“You can do nothing about it,” he says of the days his pitches don't zip and have trouble finding the strike zone. “That's why baseball is so great. You never know what's going to happen - if the other pitcher is going to give up early runs or if he's going to throw a no-hitter through seven innings. You just have to go out there and compete every time.”

Some believe Ponson occasionally lacks the concentration needed to excel in big leagues. He will be mowing down batters effortlessly, then someone gets a bloop hit and then it's bang, bang, bang, and before you know it, Ponson's given up a four runs. Does he have a propensity for allowing his focus to wander on the mound, for giving up more home runs than baseball science would seem to dictate?

“It happens to everyone,” he maintains. “If someone was perfect, no one would come to watch the game. I'm not perfect. I'm going to give up home runs. A home run is just one run.”

Ponson can be awesome on the mound. He pitched his first big league shutout earlier this year and held Seattle scoreless on three hits before being removed when he walked the first two batters in the eighth inning on June 25. Manager Mike Hargrove is happy with the way Ponson has harnessed his emotions this season. Previously, he's always worn his heart on his uniform sleeve, showing elation when he's made a great pitch, exhibiting gloom or anger when he's given up a big hit. His managers past and present say such mood displays only help his opponents. Though he still is the most temperamental pitcher on the team, Hargrove believes Ponson is improving.

“Sidney has learned channeling his emotion in the right direction this year,” says Hargrove. “That's something we worked on hard in spring training.” In fact, according to Hargrove, emotion can be an asset for a pitcher if it is employed properly.

“A lot of times anger and frustration can help you fine-tune your focus,” he says. “And that anger sometimes can add a little bit of ‘mokus' [a Hargrovian term for oomph] to what you're doing.”

If Hargrove is pleased with Ponson's progress, the pitcher is thrilled over the manager's presence in the Baltimore dugout. Ponson, like almost every pitcher on the staff, did not respect last year's manager, Ray Miller.

“Ray was a great person but a bad manager,” he says. “Now we have a great manager. He's a player's manager. He's honest with you. At the beginning of the year, he said, ‘When I come out there [on the mound], I'm going to take you out. That's it. There's no way you're going to change my mind.' That's straight out. He knows when to come to you when you're feeling down. The clubhouse is more relaxed this year.”

Ponson goes to many of his elders for advice. Sometimes he talks to former Orioles greats Jim Palmer and Mike Flanagan. Other times he solicits help from teammates Scott Erickson and Mike Mussina. “I ask Mike [Mussina] a lot of questions,” he says, “about what he thinks I'm doing wrong.”

He also talks regularly with the scout who signed him from the beaches of Aruba, Chu Jalabi, and has been working with pitching coach Sammy Ellis on a new slider.

But his earliest athletic guru - and his favorite - also is the person who gave him his first appreciation for food - his mother.

Now 51, Ponson's mother was a star athlete in Aruba, playing on the national basketball and volleyball teams. She still keeps her hand in sports, in fact, representing Aruba on the island nation's pistol squad. And she gets to watch her son pitch from home since each of his starts is carried on television in Aruba.

The island off the coast of Venezuela still is and always will be home to Ponson. He returns every winter and will live there fulltime again once his baseball career is over.

“I grew up on the beach and spent time there every day,” he relates. “I couldn't wait for school to get out so I could go to the beach. When you grow up on an island, there's not much to do but go to the beach.”

He mingled with tourists from the U.S., South America and Europe and learned to speak five languages. And he always kept his eyes looking northward, hoping one day to play baseball in the United States.

“It was my dream to play baseball, and I'm doing it now,” says Ponson. “But I haven't changed. I'm the same Sidney I was 10 years ago. I still like to make jokes, and I like to have fun.”

Fun for Ponson means getting up early when the Orioles are on the road and going to see a noon movie - preferably including a high-speed car chase or a shooting spree - prior to heading to the ballpark.

Or spending the winter in Aruba playing volley ball, going wind-surfing or SCUBA-diving. Or perhaps cooking up some beans and rice, a piece of fresh fish or some grilled shrimp.

Now that he's an established major leaguer, he is striving to continue improving. Ponson's goals for each year, though, are not overly ambitious:

“Don't get hurt, and try to throw more than 200 innings.”

He knows, though, that in the serendipitous game of baseball, fate often can be elusive.

“It's not going to happen every time that I can throw seven or eight innings,” he acknowledges. “But I go out there every time hoping to pitch seven innings for me, and eight or nine if I can, for the team.” And as he polishes off a hot fudge sundae atop a brownie to conclude his Little Italy lunch, Ponson reflects on his good fortune.

“I think I'm a very lucky guy,” he concedes. “I'm one of 750 people who can say they're in the major leagues. It's a lot of hard work to get here, and even harder work to stay up here. Talent will bring you to a certain point, and then the rest of it is hard work. I'm very proud of what I'm doing and will pitch as long as I can.”