Today In Things Making You Fatter: Baseball

Shocking news out of the halls of SI today: all-you-can-eat deals at baseball games are extremely unhealthy, and teams might have some ethical obligation to stop such promotions. To the pull-quotes!

The star of this piece is Matthew Cavalier, an Orioles fan whom we meet on the concourse during a recent game at Camden Yards. He's a gem.

• Cavalier: (presumably) between bites of Camden Yard Dogs:

"It's a great deal, especially for the teams that aren't selling out every game. The Phillies, Yankees and all them are always going to be fine. They don't need to do this. But for fans of, say, this team, it's a good plan."

• A well-done example of using a quote to emphasize your previous point:

Knowing many fans like Cavalier will spend more than $40 on a ticket and food, teams target fans like him and lure him with the value of the ticket. And with his penchant for going back for more (Cavalier said he usually eats "double to triple" in the all-you-can-eat seats as he normally does at an Orioles game), he also embodies the concerns of nutritionists and the questions of responsibility that have followed the trend since its inception.

"Well, it's all-you-can-eat," Cavalier said, shrugging. "I figure I might as well take advantage of it."

• Cavalier, piling it on:

"I mostly go for the hot dogs," he said. "One good thing about this is that they have cold stuff like ice cream. I've had a bunch of the ice cream. Oh, I tried one thing of salad too, because last year they didn't have a salad.

Tried? "I didn't eat all of it," Cavalier said. "It's nice that they're trying for healthier stuff, but I'm at a ballpark."

• Mary Lee, longtime Camden Yards usher, on the underground eating contests that spring up because of the all-you-can-eat promotion:

She remembered one last season most specifically. "There were two kids from Virginia," she said, pointing to the seats she remembered them occupying. "One had eaten 16 hot dogs, and the other wasn't far behind."

It goes on like that for a while and you are encouraged to check it out, even though the headline has a really lazy pun.

Growing trend: All-you-can-eat sections at big-league parks [Sports Illustrated]