When Willson Contreras showed up for his first spring training as a full-time first baseman, he knew the learning curve would be steep. A year after he'd made over his catching mechanics entirely, a massive effort that earned some vinegary grousing from his co-workers and led to him getting his forearm broken on a catcher's interference, Contreras arrived at camp ready to start all over again. He was notably bulked up, and spent hours throughout the first weeks of camp having Cardinals infield coach Stubby Clapp fire grounders at him out of a machine called The Red Rocket; Contreras's brother William, a star catcher on the Brewers, "told me when I told him I was switching positions ... that I couldn’t be mean anymore and that I had to start saying ‘Hi’ to people."
Most of what Contreras was looking forward to about the move, though, came down to the fact that his new job would be less all-consuming than his previous one, which required him to go over scouting reports and work with his team's pitchers. “I have plenty of time to do everything now,” Contreras told MLB.com's John Denton in February. "One of the biggest keys to being a good hitter is having time to reflect on an at-bat or watch video to make adjustments. Now I can talk about hitting, and it feels relaxing to have time to talk to other hitters and ask them questions."
Was it during one of those conversations, either in the dugout or at first, that someone first raised with Willson Contreras the question of which types of baseball equipment might be tasty, or even just edible? Was it one of the anthropomorphized Zyn packets on the Cardinals roster, or some baserunner just passing through who put the thought into his head? Or was it just a blind and unreasoning panic, with the pitch clock winding down and Twins starter Joe Ryan ready to deal and the tape on his bat loosening worryingly during Saturday's game, that led Contreras to hastily bite down on the end of that tape, tear it off, wad it up, and stuff it into his mouth like an unholy length of Fruit By The Foot? Does it matter?
The Cardinals broadcast team did not know the answer, and compared Contreras to an elementary school kid eating paste. The tape was still in Contreras's mouth when he swung and missed at Ryan's next pitch, ending the inning. A trip to the plate that ends with a strikeout and your team's own broadcasters dropping an entirely warranted Ralph Wiggum scouting comp on you is, as the baseball guys say, Not What You Want. And while there was an easy enough explanation for why Contreras was in such a rush—he'd used his only allowed timeout earlier in the at-bat, and would have been subject to an automatic strike call if he didn't get in the box—none of that quite justified it.
After the game, when Contreras spoke to Denton about it, he seemed confused and a little unsettled by what had happened—like someone who was trying to figure out whether the man who gnawed on a bunch of tape on TV was the same person he had once imagined himself to be, or just like someone who still had the taste of sporting goods in his mouth and had just been informed that he'd recently been on TV engaging in goat-type behaviors. "That was a bad taste, really bad," Contreras told Sexton, laughing. "I don’t try to put [pine tar or sticky spray] on my [bat], but it was disgusting. It was a bad taste.
"With this clock, you have to do things that are out of your control, and I had to do that instead of striking out," Contreras continued. "Well, I struck out anyways, but I’d rather strike out swinging rather than by the clock. I don’t think [chewing the tape] was a bad thing to do, but I was just running out of time." Even without the heavy obligations that come with playing catcher, the game can speed up on you; even for a three-time All-Star beginning his 10th season in the bigs, there are challenges that can't be anticipated, and no way to know whether you will stress-eat something adhesive unless and until you are forced into an answer.
Credit to Denton for asking Contreras whether he would have made tape-eating a habit had he homered instead of striking out, and credit to Contreras for answering honestly. "If I hit a homer on that, I’m doing it every time," he said.
