No one could deny that Mike Morse had the talent to become a fearsome Major League slugger. At 6’5, hovering around 245 pounds, Morse earned the nickname “The Beast,” unleashing on pitches with a violent whip of a swing. But through his first six years in the Majors, he suffered various injuries and could not remain healthy enough to play a full season.
Not yet 30 years old, Morse felt his body betraying him. “In the middle of the night, to get up to go to the bathroom, my knees would hurt,” he remembers. If it was not his knees, it was his back or his shoulders or his ankles.
There are 162 games in a season. Morse, who plays infield and outfield, had reached his career high in 2010 with 98 games played. He dulled his daily aches with pain medication, but he started thinking he would never find a way to rid his recurrent injuries. “When it’s a constant thing, you keep coming back to, ‘Well, maybe it’s my body. That’s it, that’s life.’”
Jim McIsaac/Geyyt Images Sport
That season, playing for the Washington Nationals, he finished a game suffering with another bout of leg pain, nearly straining a hamstring muscle. He sat down in the clubhouse about to dig into a pile of macaroni and cheese, when teammate Jayson Werth confronted him.
“That ain’t good for you,” Werth lectured. Just a few seasons before, Werth had mounted a resurgence of his own. He staunchly believed in eating healthfully. “From here, you need to start eating better or you’re going to jeopardize your career," he continued. "You’ve got to eat clean so you can heal faster.”
Werth was not merely admonishing Morse for binging on junk food. He explained that inflammation, which slows recovery time, is a direct result of gluten.
In the offseason, Morse walked into Dr. Robert Pastore’s office in New York City and admired the photos of athlete-clients adorning the walls. After conducting blood work on Morse, Pastore discovered he was “hyper sensitive to gluten,” which had likely caused his daily soreness. “If I had pancakes today,” Morse offers as a hypothetical, “tomorrow I would feel it in my joints.”
“He explained to me that we eat so much gluten, it has to store itself in your body and usually it stores itself in the joints you use a lot,” Morse says of his consultation with Dr. Pastore. “In baseball, we use our shoulders, our knees, our ankles and stuff. Those pains I was feeling in the morning was pretty much because of the gluten I was eating.”
David Banks/Getty Images Sport
Morse immediately switched to gluten-free bread and rice pasta (items commonly found in grocery stores these days). After a month of eating better, he says he lost five pounds and woke up without aching. His results showed on the field as well the next season. Morse had the best year of his career in 2011, batting .303, hitting 31 home runs, driving in 95 runs and appearing in 146 games. Even the pain he experienced was encouraging. Before, he would feel soreness in a broad area of his body, but he says the pain he felt in 2011 was in precise areas he could pinpoint for the team’s training staff.
Having spent the last four years devoted to eating less gluten, Morse is now enjoying a solid season with the San Francisco Giants. He still misses pizza and battered fried food, but over-the-counter digestive pills help his body process the little gluten he does consume. He has discovered a love for quinoa and his wife keeps him in check by cooking gluten-free at home, although Morse has learned to appreciate her vegetable shakes. “The color of these things when they come out, it may start with a green color and then it comes out to a chunky brown," he says. "I bet it’s great for you, but I still can’t get it down the hatch.”
Brad Mangin/Getty Images Sport
Morse says he has influenced Giants outfielder Hunter Pence and catcher Buster Posey to cut back on gluten. Other players need more persuading. “If some guy’s eating a doughnut or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I’ll take it away," Morse says. "Sometimes you got to do it. You’ve got to pick one: your body or the taste of that doughnut for a couple seconds. I try to have fun with it and not piss anybody off.” There is still at least one non-believer on the team. “The one guy that keeps going back is Brandon Crawford. And I think he’s doing it in spite of me now,” Morse adds with a chuckle.
Even a big guy like Morse gets pushed around a bit. When he recently played the Nationals, Werth approached him before the game and reminded him to be grateful.
“You’re welcome,” Werth said.
“For what?” Morse replied.
“For saving your career,” Werth asserted.
“I'm glad I listened to him.”
