9 hotdogs and 9 beers in 9 innings. ⚾
One man's account of the 9-9-9 Challenge.
Good morning, everyone. Happy 4/20.
When you walk outside in New York City today, you will be experiencing something we like to call weather to write home about. If New York is your home, give your mom a call anyway. To usher in the sunny season, my friend Jack embraced an ancient tradition for the first time: the 9-9-9 Challenge. I still don’t understand why, but after reading this piece I understand the rituals of baseball a little more, and Jack a little less. Of course, he will be in the comment section, ready to discuss his experience.
Today’s letter also includes: What I know about Adam Rapoport writing for Air Mail, Hunter Harris and Peyton Dix’s new podcast deal, and Patrick Radden Keefe thinks the next season of Industry should be about the high-stakes world of media.
Our next Guest Lecture is with Gwyneth Paltrow. Paid readers can ask her anything in the Feed Me chat.
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More Like Cold Dogs. By Jack Mankiewicz
Jack Mankiewicz is a writer from Los Angeles who lives in Brooklyn. He also used to be my roommate. He contributes to Feed Me occasionally, writing about sports and gambling.
Today, he wrote about the 9-9-9 Challenge — a special baseball fan protocol where one attempts to consume 9 hot dogs and 9 beers within the 9 innings of a single Major League Baseball game. Below is his story.
It is appropriate that baseball and Spring, two of the world’s great symbols of renewal, go hand in hand. Last year’s strikeouts, winter’s bitter snowstorms, they all melt away when the calendar turns to April. It is a time of rebirth, when anything feels possible. The cherry blossoms open their faces to the morning light, the ballplayers step on to that shimmering green diamond, and hope springs(!) eternal. Dreams could come true, the Mets could win the World Series, and I could eat nine hot dogs in 2 ½ hours without feeling sick.
It was in this spirit of optimism that I found myself alone at Citi Field last week, on a blisteringly cold day, with 40 mph winds whipping across the stadium, losing feeling in the tips of my fingers and reckoning with the painful fact that my hot dogs were beginning to freeze.
“I began to spiral, envisioning my cholesterol shooting up into the thousands like a slot machine that just hit the jackpot. What was I doing? Why was I here? Then I looked up.”
I had come here to kill two birds with one baseball. I was going to go to my first game of the season, always a sacred ritual, but I was also going to perform a more ungodly rite, and take the 999 Challenge. For the uninitiated, the 999 Challenge began as a fan-invented battle of will, in which you eat nine hot dogs and drink nine beers over the course of…you guessed it, nine innings. The challenge was recently sanctioned by the powers of the MLB, so that you could now purchase it yourself from a stadium vendor and receive all your hot dogs at once without missing any precious baseball waiting in line.
The night before I was feeling good, already beginning my monk-like fast in preparation, when I checked Mets Weather, and saw that “expected cold and windy conditions” had caused the team to move the game from 7:10 PM to 4:10 PM.