Interview #57: Quacked on Padres
Bryson Breedlove on baseball, sobriety and spontaneous pneumothorax
Bryson Breedlove, who goes by QuackedOnPadres on Twitter, has had a wild life so far, but a constant throughout it all has been baseball, which his parents ingrained in him since he was a kid. He’s a SoCal native with brief stops in Oregon and Monterey that help explain how he’s a Padres, Ducks and Seahawks fan. He’s also been in school for marine biology, been a California firefighter and now continues to pursue a career helping people.
He’s also, as of this post, just past one year of sobriety after struggling with alcoholism over the past few years. Hearing the before and after of how baseball and drinking, and now baseball and sobriety, have affected his life is a completely new perspective for me. He was open with it, and now wants to continue to foster good vibes in the Padres and baseball community through his social media work and giveaways/contests. You can follow him on Twitter, linked above, and keep an eye out for the beginning of the baseball season when he ramps up his new endeavor.
A Family Affair
You're from California?
Originally Orange County. Born in Newport and then raised in Rancho San Margarita. When I lived in Orange County, my dad worked for Disney. It's kind of where it all got started with loving sports. When I was born, the Mighty Ducks came out. When he was working there, we got to go to the first (Ducks) game. I fell in love with sports. My first baseball game was at Angel Stadium.
Some of my first memories are at Angel Stadium. My dad loved baseball and made sure that it was something that as a kid I enjoyed. My mom also enjoys it. Her and my stepdad live out near Palm Springs, she'll come down and see me and she always wants to go to a Padres game.
I was playing T-ball. Goofy looking kid in glasses, like big old glasses in the 90s, in the Kelly-green A's jersey that they give you. My parents never really forced it on me, (they) were extremely supportive of me playing sports, especially baseball.
I don't know if it's the complexity of the game. I don't really know what holds me to it. The more nitty and gritty we can get… like I saw last night, I'm in a couple of X group chats and someone said, man, I can't wait till we get the Statcast of percentage of correct ABS (automatic ball strike) challenges. I was like, I don't know what that's gonna look like, but I need that stat. Baseball’s that one sport where I feel like you can do the deepest dive into the stats. The moments definitely draw me to it. I feel like there's hundreds of different moments that can take place that are all epic. For me, I think baseball, and I don't know if it's a genetic thing, but it's just been there, man.
What does your dad like most about it?
He likes going to the “ballyard”. He just loves the atmosphere of it; if you could get a CD, which I'm sure exists somewhere, of ambient ballpark sounds, that would be what my dad would play in the background all the time. I think it's just a vibe for him that he loves. He lives in Pensacola, FL now, and Pensacola has a double-A team: the Blue Wahoos. Gorgeous stadium right on the water in Pensacola. Dude's got season tickets. He just loves ball, you know. It's just there.
How long did you play for?
I got tired of it freshman year high school, started to transition more into golf and surfing that year. Was fully done, I would say by sophomore year. In high school, there was some health things that had taken place that put a definitive end to it. So part of it was my choice and then part of it was, like, good thing I'm already on this path 'cause to come back from what had taken place would have been really difficult.
Were you still able to golf?
Yeah. I was 15 and I actually was in the midst of training to tryout for the golf team. I was on a golf course out in Palm Desert and my lung spontaneously collapsed. It's called a spontaneous pneumothorax. I didn't know what was happening, my parents didn't know what was happening. Ended up in the hospital, that turned into a week. Came out of it and was back up and running within like a month-and-a-half. By that point I was so focused on golf that I couldn't go to the other side.
Was that just easier to get back into with getting your lungs back working?
It's not necessarily just a lung thing. A lot of people don't realize an extended hospital stay, being down and out for a week, truly in a bed for a week, really takes its toll on your muscles. To get back to where I was would have been more difficult (for baseball).
What do you do for work?
I am waitlisted for Invasive Cardio Technology which is a program that at the end of it, I'll be able to assist in the cath lab.
Is that something you have experience in?
I do have a little bit of medical experience. I was a certified EMT for over 14 years and a firefighter as well.
Wildfire or city fire?
State. SoCal fire.
That's rough.
Yeah, man. 2020 took place and I was like, dude, this is crazy. My body just started to be done. My knees were absolutely shot. I was married at the time and COVID hit and you go from, you know 70- to 80-hour straight shift to, I don’t know when I’m coming home, I don't know what’s happening. When and if you got time off, it was, what do I do? Do I go inside? Do I sleep in my car? It was an extremely stressful, difficult time.
I was like, I'm young enough to take what I've learned and apply that somewhere else in a more secured setting where I'm not necessarily going to become part of the emergency at any given point. So I took the jump and went back to school, got a regular job and, yeah, pretty close to being in that program.
Is being a firefighter what you wanted to do?
It was either become a firefighter or become a marine biologist. Marine biologist was actually what I originally went out to go and do, that's what I went to college for. I went to (CSU) Monterey Bay, pretty much the epicenter for marine biology.
You were an Otter!
I was an Otter, man. CSUMB is a very strange school. They have very specific majors that don't really transfer very well. So within my first semester, I realized I had made a mistake, and the cost was insane for my parents. So I actually moved back to San Diego and went to Miramar College. That’s where I got my fire certs, my EMT certs.
So Northern California wasn't for you?
I love Northern California. It is gorgeous. I surfed. I was 18 in a sleepy town, there's only on-campus parties. I needed to go back to an actual city. I still actually talk to quite a few people that I met up there, but I think Northern California is a visiting place for me versus a living place.
Well NorCal isn’t for everyone, just the cool people 😎. I wanted to ask more about firefighting but we got sidetracked. I was on a baseball team with about 8 wildfire firefighters here in AZ a couple years ago and their schedule wreaked havoc on our team. One day we’d have 15 people in the dugout, the next they’d be called to some brush fire in western New Mexico and we’d have our top 5 hitters out of the lineup. Or when our best hitter missed a week with a sprained wrist from a fire hose. And then our starting pitcher left with a month to go to go help with the bushfires that tore through Australia in 2019. Probably hard to sustain a relationship with that schedule.
Baseball and (No) Beer
What was your typical game-day experience like during the worst times of your alcoholism?
We're getting into it. I love it. Let's see, start with the last one that I went to that I can remember. Normally it would be like a Saturday night game. Wasn't a fan of day games for some reason. It would start with us drinking at the house, my wife and I. Go to the trolley, sneak beers on the trolley. We'd go to La Puerta. La Puerta is a heavy metal Mexican restaurant on 4th. It's awesome, probably the best green salsa I've ever had in my life and their happy hour is half-off, so we would get absolutely trashed. Go to the game, spend way too much, and then go out after. It was non-stop, dude, it was bad. Make it home, not remember, I’d have to watch the highlights like four times. It was bad, dude.
And now? I went to Friar Fest, and dude, I saw myself in so many people. I got there at 10 AM. It was my sponsor's birthday, so he wanted to go and I'm like alright dude let's go. People were pounding beers at like 10 AM. It brought back where I was like, I know how that ends and I know what tomorrow is like. And I know what the next day is like.
Have you thought about why you went so hard to get through a baseball game?
Part of it was social situations from the PTSD. Everywhere I went, I had to be able to get a drink. That's what it was, especially if that place had a lot of people. That's a problem. If you ask any recovering alcoholic and they don't give you this answer, then they're lying: but I also just fucking love drinking. Straight up dude, baseball and beer is one of the greatest things on Earth. It's America. That was part of it, too, man.
What's really helped me out, and how baseball has helped me actually get through a lot of my problems, is the intricacies of it, the deepness of it and the history. It's just nerdy. And if I have something to focus on apart from alcohol. That's basically it.
So now going to a game sober, what is that experience for you?
I mean, it's fun. You're able to actually focus on the game. You're definitely not in the bathroom as much, that’s a big positive. The sad part of it, for me, so when you go into, for instance, I didn't do a rehab, I didn't do any of that. I went to AA because I thought they would help, and they did. They tell you all these cliches. They tell you one of the things is, if you're in this program long enough, it ruins drinking for you. Your body may still want you to drink, but it's ruined. The fun of it is ruined. That's really what's taken hold. So baseball games, what I've noticed is I instantly can tell like, that person is in the midst of addiction. You can see it. When you're in there long enough, you can see it happening in front of you and it hurts, like it sucks.
What a lot of people don't know, “normies” is what we refer to you people as, the people that can go and buy a six-pack of craft beer and it's in your fridge for a week, that's a normal person. Or someone that, when you go to a restaurant and they get a second beer, but they only drink half of it, that's a normal person. So what people don't get is if you're a normal person with alcohol consumption, you're not gonna get the way that I feel. It's always gonna sound crazy what I'm saying to you. When I look at someone else I know is in the midst of alcoholism, and I see them get up six or seven times and always come back with a beer, or two, I know what that next day is. I know what the days after that are like and I know how painful that is.
The actual process of going through withdrawal is something I would never wish upon anybody. The actual physical pain that you go through and mentally is beyond what I can put into words. That's what I really feel, now. I don't get jealous of people drinking, which is weird to say. Like I know what two beers feels like, I know what three beers feels like. I know when you're drinking seven, shit's gonna go bad. When I'm with my friends at a game and they have a beer or two, it doesn't even bother me. I don't worry about them. It's just seeing (someone drinking several beers) what that guy's going through, and it takes away from the game because now I'm thinking about that, and now I'm spiraling. I just wanna watch the game. When my season tickets are in play, which should be next season, I would never do a full home season, I couldn't do it mentally. I love going to games. I do. But you just gotta take them on a game-by-game basis.
Do you think being into the minutia of the sport helps? I know a lot of people that are casual fans and can't go without getting a beer, like, ‘that's why I'm going.’ Whereas I can go, I can keep score, I can follow stories, check stats. Like you said earlier, baseball and beer, it’s like they're made for each other. But do you feel like it's also sport where people like you, who never want to touch a beer again, are there parts of it that help you? Maybe it’s the sport, maybe the community of fans, anything that helps you going forward.
Both. I heard someone say this many, many, many years back and it's stuck with me. The cool thing about baseball is you can look at it so many different ways. You can look at it as simple as you want, or as complex as you want. I follow people based on vibes. There's some really casual fans, I follow them and they barely know anything and their tweets are hilarious. And then I follow this guy that works sabermetrics for the Mets, his tweets are like insane. What are you even talking about? But that's the cool thing about baseball. For me, I like to be able to at a lineup and go, we're down two and I know that the Dodgers are probably gonna put out this pitcher and we're probably gonna sub this guy because he hits left-handed pitchers better. That's the level that I like to stay at. When you're able to get into your head and produce thoughts like that versus like, man, I wish I had a beer right now, things are a lot better.
The Padres community is really, really special. Yes, it is notable as one of the communities that really likes to talk crap and get really worked up over very small things. We all kind of embrace that. Now we're doing self-deprecating humor about it. But at a personal level, the Padres community, Padres Twitter, even some of the families of the players, the players themselves, it's a really, really wonderful community, very understanding, helpful. There's a lot of generous people in this community and it's awesome to be a part of it. As goofy as it can be sometimes, my account really does come from a good place of trying to build baseball and make someone's day if I can and just get through life a day at a time, man.
Is the Gaslamp Quarter tougher to be around now? It’s really like being around Wrigleyville where you go to the bars before and after Padres games.
I've had many a night I don't remember down on those streets. So if you would have asked me that question during the first time I was trying to stay sober, I would have told you, ‘Dude, I don't how I'm gonna do this.’ Now, I don't even think about it. What I won't do is put myself in a situation that I know is gonna cause me to be upset, right?
So no playoff games.
No playoff games, definitely not. I can't do it, and that's not even from a recovering alcoholic standpoint. That is from like PTSD, I cannot be in this environment right now. I just don't do well in crowds anymore. And that, to me, would be the bigger problem than the drinking. I only went to one game last season. I'm not going to go to a playoff game until maybe another year or two into my sobriety. I'm not going to the Friday Beerfest games. As long as I don't enter one of those situations I should okay. I've done concerts, I've done football games.
That’s wild hearing about his experience with being an alcoholic and a baseball fan. For me, two beers at a baseball game is about all I can handle (and, at $15 a can, all I can afford), but going 6+ drinks (or doing the 9/9/9 challenge, which is probably impossible: 9 innings, 9 hot dogs, 9 beers) would be miserable. I can go to a game and get a beer, or I can go and just get a lemonade and still watch.
But for a recovering alcoholic, I would’ve thought a sports event would be a tough thing to get back into, with beer and alcohol everywhere, ads and concessions and smells giving sensory overload, the fact that you can get one drink and tell yourself you’ll nurse it for a few innings…
But then also, if you’re trying to keep your mind busy and focused, baseball does a good job of that, as well, if you want to. You can just watch the game, focus on little things, watch the way everyone has a different batting stance, or zone out watching the grounds crew drag the infield, or any number of things to get through 9 innings without thinking or needing a drink. Or just go with a friend or partner or group and hang out.
I know baseball and beer are wedded in the American fabric, we have Coors Field and Busch Stadium, and used to have Miller Park. We have a team literally called the Brewers. But, and maybe this exists and I just haven’t noticed it, but if baseball tried to be a little more accommodating to the sober crowd, whether it’s alcohol-free sections, or I don’t know, partnering with AA for something, or even just offering non-alcoholic beers and mocktails (I know at Chase Field there’s one spot you can get a non-alcoholic beer, and it’s in the Cold Beers and Cheeseburgers restaurant in upper deck left field). But then again, I don’t have an alcohol addiction so I don’t know what ways would be best.
Also, the Simpsons (of course) has a clip of Bryson’s first baseball game after getting sober:
Giveaways and The Hobby
So explain what you’re doing with your Twitter account now.
What really jump started my whole resurgence back into Padres Twitter, and what my account’s turned into now… I became aware that I had some issues with alcohol in 2022. Attempted to get sober on my own. Baseball was a huge part of that. And I'll explain why. The term within recovery is, I was trying to “white-knuckle” it. I wasn't talking to anyone about it. I was basically like, dude, I'm just sober. It was insane. You're tackling every problem on your own, and it's just awful. And eventually that leads to you being like “F it”, I'm just getting drunk.
So I ended up drinking. Weirdly enough, I chose Lake Elsinore, a Storm game. Left work, bailed out of work and went to a Storm game. That was really bad time. That would've been spring of 2023. So I continued drinking through that period and decided that I wanted to do it right this time. So in winter 2024, I entered Alcoholics Anonymous and got a sponsor and went through the whole thing. And here we are a year and a month later. Life's completely different and I left an abusive situation that I was in.
So when you take something that's a huge part of your life out of your life, you try to replace it. A lot of people really get into fitness or they hyper focus on a hobby. Which is technically another addiction, but we don't really talk about it. So for me, I realized that helping out people, generosity and just being a good person and trying to brighten people's days made my everyday easier and then filled the void of not having alcohol anymore
So the point of the account is fun, first off, to have fun. To provide a space where I'm out and open with my mental issues, depression, and my struggles with alcoholism. I'm taking that on face first, showing everyone my face. If you don't wanna do that, that's OK. But if you wanna talk to me about that because you don't have someone else to talk to, I'm open for that as well. Yeah, I do a lot of giveaways. A lot of people follow me for that. Something that I've noticed is that I'll do a giveaway, announce the giveaway, and no one leaves. There is something tangible here that people will follow. We're trying to branch out into other things. We don't know exactly, apart from streaming, which we're trying to nail down, we're trying to think of other things to do, but the main focus is always going to be trying to make someone’s day better.
I really dove into it starting this past winter. That's really when the baseball card hobby came back 'cause this ties in with my love of baseball. I collected cards as a kid. It just became another hobby. I realized that it's a niche, and it's nerdy as hell, and I love it. That's really what launched me into being like, there is a content niche here, I can do baseball content with other things tied into it.
The next big jump was me leaving the situation I was in previous to this and now I live a mile from Petco Park. So I feel like I'm constantly like in the bubble of baseball, being this close.
What are your goals for the coming season and beyond? I don't know much about the new era of baseball cards. I have tons, I've got binders full. But these days I don’t know what’s going on. They’ve got their own lingo.
People refer to it as The Hobby. Talk about different types of people, there’s hardcore people, there's casual people, it's the spectrum of people. I got into it just as a one off. I was at Target and I saw a box of cards. I hadn’t opened a box of cards in years and that was really fun. And so I was like, I wonder if there's a space for this. I looked into it and I started watching breaks. This is like gambling. I bought into a few breaks and didn't really hit very much. I was like, I don't know if this is for me, so I started buying packs of my own. You just hit what you can hit. I looked into it more, realized that buying singles was the way to go through eBay.
So I started collecting here and there. I had a side thing going on and that side thing had a massive lucrative month and that's when I realized-
Oh, your OnlyFans took off?
Yeah, yeah. I had a bet hit massively, and I went OK, I did things for myself to improve my living situation. But the other part of that was like, I'm just gonna grow the community, grow the space, see how big I can get this. My good friend came in and he was like, dude, I love the positivity, I love what's going on; I'm just gonna hop on and do all your graphics and if this pops off and we actually get something, just don't forget me. I was like, yeah, let's go! And that's what it's been so far. We are really, really, really waiting on the beginning of the season. That's really gonna be where we take off. We got some stuff working behind the scenes that we’re trying to figure out if it's gonna work, if we can branch out that far. We're talking about a 30-team network. Fan-ingrained content versus beat reporter stuff.
I wish Bryson the best with sobriety and the side project he’s working on, and hopefully I can get out to Petco and see some Padres baseball this season.
Wasn't expecting this. Which made it even better. Awesome. Loved every bit of it. Gonna follow this guy and tell some of my San Diego friends about him.