As CC Sabathia pitches, Joe Girardi offers a cereal story

Despite being lactose intolerant, Yankees manager Joe Girardi owns a deep affinity for breakfast cereal. That was a topic Girardi volunteered during a slow morning meeting with the media on Saturday, for which his bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios — no milk, just dry cereal — was left abandoned in the visiting clubhouse at O.co Coliseum.

Girardi mentioned that he’d never told this story before, but when he was growing up, his family owned a farmhouse that his mother grew up in. Railroad tracks ran behind the property, and when Girardi was about 8 years old, a train derailed and one of the cargo containers littered Cap’n Crunch cereal boxes all over the area. Though Girardi never saw the wreck, he remembers his uncle racing to the area and scooping up as much as he could.

“We had so much Cap’n Crunch over the next year, it was amazing,” Girardi said. “To this day, I still like Cap’n Crunch. I don’t eat a lot of it, but I will have a handful, just to have a little bit of sugar.”

CC Sabathia certainly would be interested in the story. As you recall, Sabathia showed up for Spring Training last year boasting of a revamped diet that included, in part, shunning his usual indulgence of entire boxes of Cap’n Crunch.

Bryan Hoch