Cooking with Mookie Betts

Mookie Betts was one of several stars in various fields interviewed by GQ for something called The Happiness Project, with tips and tricks from folks like Betts, Phoebe Bridgers, Anthony Hopkins, Drew Barrymore, Tracy Morgan, Roxanne Gay, and others on “finding joy in tough times.”

But mostly, I just want SportsNet LA to start televising cooking episodes with Betts and his family.

Here he is, describing various ways he and his family are competitive in nature:

The cooking contest, I think I’ve only lost one, and we’ve probably had 20 or 30 of them. We do them all the time. What we do is, we will call another family member and ask them for three random ingredients. Basically “Chopped,” but at home. And usually two-on-two. One time we did lemon, popcorn, and pumpkin. I think we made, like, a little pizza situation, and it was layered with popcorn and pumpkin, and it had, like, lemony sauce. It was the best that it could have been, like a 5 out of 10. That’s never going to be good, but I made it better than them — that’s all that matters.

Links

• Major League Baseball announced on Monday the creation of an MLB Draft combine from June 20-28 in Cary, North Carolina. Per MLB, “top high school and college baseball prospects, as identified by MLB Clubs, who will have the opportunity to participate in a series of medical & performance assessments as well as educational programming designed to prepare them for a career in professional baseball.” In addition, the top 88 high school prospects will play in an eight-game showcase tournament as part of the proceedings. R.J. Anderson at CBS Sports first had news of this pending combine last week, and Carlos Collazo at Baseball America dove into the details as well.
• Bill Shaikin at the Los Angeles Times looks into the Cactus League asking MLB to delay the start of spring training.
• Eno Sarris at The Athletic dug deep into the data for Charlotte, Portland, Nashville, and other potential targets for MLB expansion.