Chris Stapleton's Whiskey Teamed Up With Major League Baseball

Late in 2024, Major League Soccer announced that it had an official whiskey for the first time, and that that official whiskey was made by Jameson. Turns out MLS isn’t the only American sports league to get its own official whiskey. Now, Major League Baseball has one as well — and there’s some star power behind it. Specifically, the star power of country star Chris Stapleton, whose Traveller Whiskey just signed an agreement making it MLB’s official whiskey.

Since the 2023 announcement of Traveller Whiskey’s inception, the whiskey has earned solid reviews, with InsideHook’s Kirk Miller calling it “crowd-pleasing and affordable.” And Whisky Advocate‘s Sean Evans observed that “[i]t’s good neat or with ice, and it stands up in a cocktail.”

All of which is to say that an accessible, eminently drinkable whiskey certainly sounds like an appealing drink to sip at the ballpark. Besides Traveller’s availability at MLB games, the company will also feature what the announcement called “fan activations” around All-Star Week and this year’s MLB Speedway Classic.

To hear Stapleton tell it, he’s a longtime baseball enthusiast, making this partnership feel natural. “Whenever we’re on the road and it happens to line up, we go to baseball games. It’s become a bit of a tradition over the years,” he said in a statement. “We love to experience all the different ballparks and enjoy the culture of whatever baseball town we happen to be in. My wife and I even went to Game Six of the World Series once on our anniversary.”

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Stapleton’s fondness for the game might also explain his penchant for donning apparel from different teams over the years. While researching this, I stumbled onto a group of Toronto Blue Jays fans on Reddit debating whether Stapleton’s choice of a Blue Jays cap in one music video meant that they were his team of choice.

Stapleton is originally from Kentucky and now lives in Nashville, so there isn’t a default MLB team in there – though he did show up to one 2024 interview wearing a hat for the AAA Nashville Sounds. Though in this case, being a fan of the sport itself might serve him well when it comes to this new deal.

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…