Forwards Eric Fehr and Jay Beagle and defenseman Karl Alzner played together from 2008-15 during the Capitals’ “Rock the Red” era, when Washington teams had no shortage of star power, personality and playoff appearances. Beagle and Fehr were depth forwards known more for their checking than their offense. Alzner was more prominently featured as the team’s top “defensive defenseman,” logging plenty of minutes alongside star blueliner John Carlson.
The Chums did everything together on the road, from dinners to battling the tedium of long plane rides. Beagle said that while NHL players form bonds with teammates in every dressing room, these bonds felt different.
“Really looking back at it, those years with those guys were some of the best years of my life, just playing hockey and having those friendships,” he said. “It was so special.”
Only Beagle was still with the Capitals when they won the Stanley Cup in 2018. Fehr left as a free agent in 2015. Alzner did the same in 2017.
“We were super tight,” Alzner said. “Then you notice that when you stop playing together, you just don’t talk to the guys nearly as much. You miss it.”
“Life catches up to you,” Fehr said. “You just get too busy.”
So the Chums drifted, until something unexpected reunited them recently. Fehr, Beagle and Alzner are all involved with LactiGo, a topical muscle recovery and sports performance gel that they say is gaining popularity among NHL players. Fehr is on the board of directors for LactiGo, while Beagle and Alzner are active investors. Fehr is also on the board for Ethoderm, the pharmaceutical side of the company.
As rewarding as they hope this business can be, becoming teammates again has been its own reward.
“It feels like we’re still playing together,” Alzner said. “Even though we’re not talking hockey specifically, we have that same cadence that you would have if you were talking to a current teammate. Having had an opportunity to try and succeed on the ice and now having it off the ice is pretty special.”
NHL PLAYERS ARE CONSTANTLY being pitched with financial opportunities. Not all of them work out.
“There were a few of us in Washington, right at the beginning of my career, we all put some money into something and we all lost it. A good lesson, right away,” Alzner said. “Right from there, I was a little bit gun-shy about what I was going to put my money into, especially after I stopped playing. It’s so hard to figure out. You could make money. Or you could lose all of your money.”
The first one to get involved with LactiGo was Fehr. He was playing for the AHL San Diego Gulls in 2017-18 when he was pitched a product he hadn’t heard of before. Teammate Michael Liambas brought him LactiGo, which Liambas was using to revive weary legs.
“You get a bunch of these things coming your way when you’re playing pro hockey. People always bringing you stuff,” Fehr recalled. “And then I used it, and I’m like, ‘This is crazy.’ My legs were so loose, so good. I started sharing it with teammates and buddies.”
Fehr brought it to the Chums. Beagle was skeptical until he considered the source.
“You get pitched a lot of things when you’re playing. A lot of weird, random things. This was one I tried out, because it was coming from Fehr,” Beagle said. “He’s such a good guy. Like, a good human. So when he calls, you answer. And when he says something, you take it seriously, because he lives with integrity.”
Alzner was around 31 years old when Fehr pitched him and was feeling the burdens of being a veteran skater.
“My legs were starting to get … heavier,” he said. “Games were getting tougher. I hated going into practice feeling crappy, needing a couple of drills to them to come back. Going to morning skate and then it’s, ‘Surprise, my legs suck today.’ So I decided to try it out.”
Alzner was something who tried everything. Cold baths to massaging boots. He was recently reminiscing with an old teammate from Montreal about the guys using “pickle juice,” which was “literally just water with menthol in it to make their legs tingle.” Beagle recalls Alzner coming to offseason workouts with every fitness and diet fad, from low carb to no breakfasts to all manner of legal supplements.
So Alzner’s interest caught Beagle’s attention, too. If the guy who is constantly looking for the next thing settles on something, that caught Beagle’s attention.
“If you don’t know the guy, you wouldn’t really understand it,” Beagle said. “But when he gets excited about something and stays with a product for this long too, it’s a testament to how good the product must be.”
Fehr had inquired about investing in the company, but he said that founder Kevin Atkinson rebuked him. After about a year of pestering, Fehr was asked to help buy out a partner. Then he put another group together to buy out another investor, moving up to become one of LactiGo’s directors.
Alzner expressed his interest in investing, and Fehr put him in touch with Atkinson. But he had to know more about how LactiGo worked.
“It wasn’t originally even about the company. It was like, ‘My team needs to use this, because we’re not good,'” he said. “I’m one of those people that just really likes to dig in and understand why things do what they do.”
When Alzner found out that his old teammate Beagle was involved with LactiGo as well, that clarified things for him.
“When Beags got involved, you know it must be legit. Let’s just say he doesn’t really invest in … anything,” Alzner said with a laugh. “Me and Beags go way back with what we always called ‘per diem management’ on the road. If we can save money somehow, we’re saving money.”
With the Chums reunited, the next step was trying to make their product a success.
The first step was creating awareness for something players liked to keep to themselves.
“Everyone who uses it doesn’t want their competitor to use it,” Beagle said. “And unless you’re an unbelievable teammate, you don’t want even your own teammates using it in training camp because you want to be better than them, right?”
“It’s one of the best-kept secrets in hockey, and that’s the struggle we have,” Alzner said. “People want it for their own benefit and don’t want anyone else to use it.”
BOSTON BRUINS DEFENSEMANKevin Shattenkirk said he was always “just kind of an ‘au naturel’ guy” when it came to muscle recovery.
“I had never really put any sort of ointments or anything on my legs for games,” he said.
Shattenkirk played with Alzner in Washington back in 2017. About two years later, Alzner reached out with a pitch to try out LactiGo while Shattenkirk was playing with the Tampa Bay Lightning.
“I felt like there was something definitely there. Something different,” Shattenkirk said. “I thought at first maybe it was like a little bit of a placebo effect. But the more I understood the science behind it, then it all started to make sense.”
Veteran forward James van Riemsdyk became an investor in the product after using it.
“There were a few of us in Philly, but basically the whole team in Toronto was using it,” said van Riemsdyk, now a winger for the Bruins who recently passed 1,000 games played in the NHL.
When Shattenkirk was watching the U.S. men’s world juniors team celebrate its 2024 championship, he couldn’t help but notice the vibrant green-capped LactiGo cans on a table in that locker room.
“I didn’t know guys that age got tired on the ice, but it’s good to see that other people are believing in it,” he said.
When Shattenkirk signed with the Anaheim Ducks, he found teammate Vinni Lettieri was using it. That surprised him because he hadn’t known many other players that did.
Shattenkirk said he believes it’s one of the best-kept secrets among players.
“That’s not limited to hockey. It’s in all sports, really,” he said. “It’s taken a little bit of a long time for it to break through because those who’ve had it don’t really want to give it to the other guys. It’s kind of like your ace in the hole.”
Fehr said that’s been the biggest challenge in trying to market LactiGo. When an athlete believes they have an advantage, they don’t exactly want to share it.
“It’s like a secret,” he said. “We have UFC fighters using it all the time, but they don’t want the other UFC fighters to be using it too. So nobody talks about it.”
Alzner likened it to gaining inside information about an opponent as a hockey player.
“If you watch a video of somebody on a faceoff and you see his ‘tell,’ then you feel like you have an advantage. You don’t really want to let anybody know your secret,” he said. “Even on a team, you sometimes want to be better than your teammates, right? You wanna be the person that gets more ice time and all that stuff. So it’s almost like you’d almost rather not everybody use it because you want to be better than everybody else.”
But the other issue with athletes is their persnickety nature. If they add something to their routine that coincides with success, it’ll remain part of that routine. If that success turns sour, then it’s suddenly a candidate for deletion.
“That’s the problem with the hockey guys,” Fehr said. “They could put this stuff on, go out and feel the best they’ve ever felt. And if they’re a minus-3 the next game, they’ll never use it again.”
FEHR SAID THAT he and his other investors get it. They played the game and had their own idiosyncrasies. In fact, they hope that NHL experience helps build confidence for athletes that are curious about their product.
“Realizing that it’s a bunch of hockey guys behind it, that’s kind of a cool story,” Fehr said of Alzner and Beagle. “That’s the best part of this whole thing. It’s been great to stay in touch with them, but also to have a common project that we’re working on at the same time.”
They were teammates. They were Chums. And now they’ve been reunited in a way none of them had anticipated, and it feels just like old times.
Alzner said the players’ business venture has a familiar cadence for them.
“It’s same way an NHL season feels. We’re battling so hard to try and get this thing to where we want it to go,” he said. “Like in a season, there are ups and downs. One week is awesome. Then you go a week waiting for the next thing to happen. We went through the same thing as teammates, in a different way.”
Fehr said the dynamic between the three former Capitals is the same as when they were playing.
“Beags is a quiet guy, always thinking. Alzner is always making new connections and contacts, because he’s an outgoing guy. I kind of do as much work as I can and then delegate to the people in their strong areas,” he said. “It’s been a nice dynamic, and one you’d probably have seen on the ice.”
Alzner said the project has allowed the trio to learn things about each other they hadn’t known as players.
“It’s been fun to see how our brains work outside of the rink now,” he said. “I think a lot of guys go through all these different business ventures with teammates, they don’t necessarily work out and then things peter out between them. But this has been such an exciting ride so far. It’s pretty special to do this with them.”
Sportico places the value of the franchise and its team-related holdings at $4.2 billion.
Sixth Street’s investment, reportedly approved by Major League Baseball on Monday, will go toward upgrades to Oracle Park and the Giants’ training facilities in Scottsdale, Arizona, as well as Mission Rock, the team’s real estate development project located across McCovey Cove from the ballpark.
Giants president and CEO Larry Baer called it the “first significant investment in three decades” and said the money would not be spent on players.
“This is not about a stockpile for the next Aaron Judge,” Baer told the New York Times. “This is about improvements to the ballpark, making big bets on San Francisco and the community around us, and having the firepower to take us into the next generation.”
Sixth Street is the primary owner of National Women’s Soccer League franchise Bay FC. It also has investments in the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs and Spanish soccer powers Real Madrid and FC Barcelona.
“We believe in the future of San Francisco, and our sports franchises like the Giants are critical ambassadors for our city of innovation, showcasing to the world what’s only made possible here,” Sixth Street co-founder and CEO Alan Waxman said in the news release. “We believe in Larry and the leadership team’s vision for this exciting new era, and we’re proud to be partnering with them as they execute the next chapter of San Francisco Giants success.”
Founded in 2009 and based in San Francisco, Sixth Street has assets totaling $75 billion, according to Front Office Sports.
TOKYO — Shohei Ohtani seems impervious to a variety of conditions that afflict most humans — nerves, anxiety, distraction — but it took playing a regular-season big-league game in his home country to change all of that.
After the Los Angeles Dodgers‘ Opening Day 4-1 win over the Chicago Cubs in the Tokyo Dome, Ohtani made a surprising admission. “It’s been a while since I felt this nervous playing a game,” he said. “It took me four or five innings.”
Ohtani had two hits and scored twice, and one of his outs was a hard liner that left his bat at more than 96 mph, so the nerves weren’t obvious from the outside. But clearly the moment, and its weeklong buildup, altered his usually stoic demeanor.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen Shohei nervous,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “But one thing I did notice was how emotional he got during the Japanese national anthem. I thought that was telling.”
As the Dodgers began the defense of last year’s World Series win, it became a night to showcase the five Japanese players on the two teams. For the first time in league history, two Japanese pitchers — the Dodgers’ Yoshinobu Yamamoto and the Cubs’ Shota Imanaga — faced each other on Opening Day. Both pitched well, with Imanaga throwing four hitless innings before being removed after 69 pitches.
“Seventy was kind of the number we had for Shota,” Cubs manager Craig Counsell said. “It was the right time to take him out.”
The Dodgers agreed, scoring three in the fifth inning off reliever Ben Brown. Imanaga kept the Dodgers off balance, but his career-high four walks created two stressful innings that ran up his pitch count.
Yamamoto rode the adrenaline of pitching in his home country, routinely hitting 98 with his fastball and vexing the Cubs with a diving splitter over the course of five three-hit innings. He threw with a kind of abandon, finding a freedom that often eluded him last year in his first year in America.
“I think last year to this year, the confidence and conviction he has throwing the fastball in the strike zone is night and day,” Roberts said. “If he can continue to do that, I see no reason he won’t be in the Cy Young conversation this season.”
Cubs right fielder Seiya Suzuki went hitless in four at bats — the Cubs had only three hits, none in the final four innings against four relievers out of the Dodgers’ loaded bullpen — and rookie Roki Sasaki will make his first start of his Dodger career in the second and final game of the series Wednesday.
“I don’t think there was a Japanese baseball player in this country who wasn’t watching tonight,” Roberts said.
The Dodgers were without Mookie Betts, who left Japan on Monday after it was decided his illness would not allow him to play in this series. And less than an hour before game time, first baseman Freddie Freemanwas scratched with what the team termed “left rib discomfort,” a recurrence of an injury he first sustained during last year’s playoffs.
The night started with a pregame celebration that felt like an Olympic opening ceremony in a lesser key. There were Pikachus on the field and a vaguely threatening video depicting the Dodgers and Cubs as Monster vs. Monster. World home-run king Saduharu Oh was on the field before the game, and Roberts called meeting Oh “a dream come true.”
For the most part, the crowd was subdued, as if it couldn’t decide who or what to root for, other than Ohtani. It was admittedly confounding: throughout the first five innings, if fans rooted for the Dodgers they were rooting against Imanaga, but rooting for the Cubs meant rooting against Yamamoto. Ohtani, whose every movement is treated with a rare sense of wonder, presented no such conflict.
JUPITER, Fla. — St. Louis Cardinals shortstop Masyn Winn was scratched from the lineup for their exhibition game on Tuesday because of soreness in his right wrist.
Winn was replaced by Jose Barrero in the Grapefruit League matchup with the Miami Marlins, with the regular-season opener nine days away. Winn, who was a 2020 second-round draft pick by the Cardinals, emerged as a productive everyday player during his rookie year in 2024. He batted .267 with 15 home runs, 11 stolen bases and 57 RBIs in 150 games and was named as one of three finalists for the National League Gold Glove Award that went to Ezequiel Tovar of the Colorado Rockies.
Winn had minor surgery after the season to remove a cyst from his hand. In 14 spring training games, he’s batting .098 (4 for 41) with 12 strikeouts.