How ex-Capitals teammates reconnected over hockey’s ‘secret’ remedy
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Greg Wyshynski, ESPN
ON THE ICE, they were vital role players for the Washington Capitals.
Off the ice, they were simply the Chums.
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 DEFENSEMAN Kevin 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.”
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Alden Gonzalez
LOS ANGELES — Shohei Ohtani has proved to be a viable starting pitcher as the postseason approaches, but Los Angeles Dodgers manager Dave Roberts acknowledged Wednesday that the organization has considered whether he might be more valuable helping a weary bullpen — perhaps especially in a shorter series like the three-game wild-card round.
It remains far more likely that Ohtani will serve as one of the Dodgers’ starters in the playoffs, but Roberts said the possibility of Ohtani helping out of the bullpen is “something we’re all talking about.”
“I know that we are going to be talking about it,” Roberts said. “I think the one thing you can say, though, is that we use him once every seven days, eight days, nine days — [11] days in between his last start — so to think that now it’s feasible for a guy that’s just coming off what he’s done last year, or didn’t do last year, to then now put him in a role that’s very, very unique — because he’s a very methodical, disciplined, routine-driven person. The pen is the complete opposite, right? You potentially could be taking on risk, and we’ve come this far, certainly with the kid gloves and managing.”
The Dodgers’ caution while managing Ohtani’s return to the mound in the wake of a second repair of his ulnar collateral ligament was evident Tuesday, when Roberts removed him after five no-hit innings despite just 68 pitches. That decision was predetermined, Roberts said, a function of the team’s hesitancy to push him beyond the five-inning threshold this season.
Ohtani said he understood the decision but added that he wants to “pitch as long as possible.” Later, while addressing the Japanese media, Ohtani expressed an openness to playing the outfield in order to remain in the lineup after exiting as a reliever, saying: “I’ve had conversations with various people, and the idea of me pitching in relief has come up. As a player, I want to be prepared to handle whatever role is needed. If I do end up pitching out of the bullpen, I think that could also mean I’d need to play in the outfield afterward, depending on the situation. So I want to be ready for anything, no matter what comes my way.”
Major League Baseball’s two-way rule, adopted in 2019, allows Ohtani to remain in the game as the designated hitter if he starts on the mound and is replaced. But if he were to start a game — even in the playoffs — as the DH, then pitch in relief, the Dodgers would lose the DH once Ohtani stops pitching. Ohtani’s only path to remaining in the game in that situation would be to play the outfield — something he did seven times with the Los Angeles Angels in 2021.
Ohtani, though, has not done any work in the outfield this year. The Dodgers, meanwhile, are naturally hesitant to add more responsibilities to a player who’s also a catalyst atop their lineup, not to mention a legitimate stolen-base threat.
Asked if Ohtani in the outfield is on his radar, Roberts smiled and said, “No.”
“There’s a lot of variables,” Roberts said, “but to know that he can potentially run out there, it’s great. Maybe just in theory. But, again, I love him for even throwing that out there.”
The Dodgers have long been open to the possibility of Ohtani closing out a critical game in October — like he did to seal a championship for his native Japan in the 2023 World Baseball Classic — but the prospect of him helping as a reliever has ramped up as the bullpen has continued to struggle and the rotation has taken form.
The Dodgers have five other effective starters in Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow, Clayton Kershaw and Emmet Sheehan, the latter of whom also has proved to be effective out of the bullpen. Some of their highest-leverage relievers — Blake Treinen, Tanner Scott, Kirby Yates and Michael Kopech among them — have struggled to varying degrees.
If Ohtani were to pitch in relief, it would be in the ninth inning. But juggling warming up in the bullpen if his turn to bat is coming up, or if he’s required to run the bases, could prove difficult. And the Dodgers would be at risk of either losing him as a hitter or forcing him to play the outfield if the game extends to extra innings.
“I don’t know if it’s a pipe dream,” Roberts said of Ohtani playing the outfield, “but it’s very commendable from Shohei.”
PITTSBURGH — The Chicago Cubs, who haven’t been to the postseason since the 2020 season, were in the mood to party Wednesday afternoon — and so they cut loose.
After clinching a National League playoff berth with an 8-4 victory against the Pittsburgh Pirates, Cubs players and coaches high-fived and hugged each other on the field before taking the celebration up a notch in the visitors’ clubhouse at PNC Park.
With tarps in place and most wearing protective eyewear, a jubilant bunch doused each other with champagne and beer while others puffed victory cigars. Some did both.
Everything was muted during the coronavirus pandemic when the Cubs last qualified. They held off after making it in 2018, hoping to win the NL Central, just to finish second to the Milwaukee Brewers.
“It’s a grind of a season. You celebrate the first goal you accomplished,” manager Craig Counsell said. “We’ve made it to our first goal and that’s exciting. For everybody that’s been a part of the grind the whole year, for everybody that’s worked so hard to put us in this position, it’s a fun thing to do.
“You don’t get to do this in regular jobs — get to celebrate and throw champagne on each other. You just don’t get to do it, right? So you take advantage of it, have fun with it, enjoy each other and celebrate each other.”
ABSOLUTE CINEMA. pic.twitter.com/vUoKjrNMTP
— Chicago Cubs (@Cubs) September 17, 2025
FLY THE W, CHICAGO. pic.twitter.com/9Zc3CY6g1j
— Chicago Cubs (@Cubs) September 17, 2025
Ian Happ homered and drove in three runs as the Cubs won their fourth straight for their seventh victory in eight games.
The Cubs (88-64) seemed destined for the playoffs since going 18-9 in May. Still, this hasn’t been straightforward. They lead the NL wild-card standings and are 4 1/2 games back of the first-place Brewers in the Central, having surrendered the division lead on July 28 after sitting alone at the top through July 19.
“When you’re in it, you think it’s going to happen every year,” pitcher Matthew Boyd said. “The fact and the reality is this is really hard to do. … This means so much to all of us. We’re not done yet. That’s the most important thing. We still know where we want to go.”
Happ popped the cork — in the clubhouse and on the field. The Pittsburgh native has played nine years with the Cubs. He was a rookie in 2017, when Chicago won the NL Central just one year after ending a 107-year drought without winning the World Series.
Happ was there with Anthony Rizzo, Kyle Schwarber, Kris Bryant, Javier Baez and others. This time, it was Pete Crow-Armstrong by his side, pulled into a tight hug for a simple message.
“There was definitely a mention of, ‘This is not the last,'” Crow-Armstrong said. “I mean, Ian learned from some of the best. Ian is one of the best at passing that on. Ian has meant a lot to me, just as a person. I’ll follow his lead. … I’ve got full trust in Ian Happ as a leader.”
Crow-Armstrong was dynamic with 25 home runs and 71 RBIs through in 95 games through the All-Star Break. The 23-year-old has cooled considerably, having four homers and driving in 19 runs since, and is looking forward to starting fresh in the playoffs.
“I don’t know. I’ve never done this,” Crow-Armstrong said. “I’m just excited to keep doing what we’re doing, doing what we’ve done all year. I’ve never experienced October baseball. I’m just ready to go all in.”
It might be necessary.
Kyle Tucker, an All-Star right fielder, has been on the injured list since Sept. 9 with a left calf injury. He will visit with a physical therapy group in Florida used in his recovery from a right leg injury while with the Houston Astros last season.
Tucker is hitting .270 with 22 home runs, 73 RBIs and 25 stolen bases in his first season since being traded to the Cubs in December.
“We’re aligned with Kyle,” Counsell said. “This is the best way for him to make some improvements. Unfortunately, we’ve plateaued and we weren’t making progress. That’s frustrating for Kyle.”
For every mention of how great Wednesday’s celebratory moment was, there was one of how it’s not enough. The Cubs want more. Not just the division, but the World Series. Tucker would make that easier, but this wasn’t the day to worry.
“We got to go to the playoffs in 2020, but doing it near the end of a true 162 is totally different,” Nico Hoerner said. “Baseball is such a game of persistence and comradery. Getting to celebrate like this is a really special thing.
“It’s obviously not our ultimate goal, but it’s still a huge milestone along the way. It’s awesome to celebrate with this group.”
And with the Cubs reaching their first goal on the road, Counsell couldn’t help but think about their fans back in Chicago.
“You want the fans to be able to experience October baseball and be a part of that and take them on a journey with the team. That’s so much fun,” Counsell said. “Those are the people you think about when this stuff happens — everybody that puts in the work, everybody that shows up at 12 o’clock for a night game and all the fans that come every day to Wrigley.
“We want them to be able to enjoy the best of baseball, which is October.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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