The Baseball Players of the Super Bowl, and the Dilemma of the Multi-Sport Athlete

For the past two weeks, the American sports landscape has been held in the thrall of the Super Bowl. It’s secular American Christmas. The event so indelibly planted in our cultural consciousness advertisers get around the trademark by calling it “the Big Game,” and everyone knows what they mean. The Chiefs and the Eagles (Go Birds!) testing their mettle for 60 minutes on the largest stage our country has to offer (interrupted periodically by commercials and musical interludes).

No, I haven’t suffered some kind of episode and forgotten that this site is devoted entirely to a different sport. Because, you see, if you watch the Super Bowl you’ll get to see some baseball players: Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes and Eagles receiver A.J. Brown.

Mahomes affinity for baseball is well known, given that he is 1) one of the most famous athletes in the country 2) a minority owner of the Kansas City Royals and 3) the son and namesake of an 11-year major league veteran. In fact, two of the Chiefs’ three quarterbacks are sons of 11-year big league veterans; third-stringer Shane Buechele is the son of former Rangers and Cubs third baseman Steve. (Unfortunately, I don’t know what Chad Henne’s father’s profession is.)

Mahomes was a standout high school baseball player growing up in Texas, and not just in the sense that every athlete who’s good enough to play in the NFL is good enough to play basically any varsity high school sport he chooses. Mahomes had something of a rivalry with the young Michael Kopech; he bested the White Sox righty in a 2-1 pitchers’ duel in 2014, a game that’s taken on mythic status with time. Mahomes was good enough to be picked by the Tigers in the 37th round of the draft that year, and to make the baseball team as a freshman — no small feat considering the Red Raiders made the College World Series that season.

But Mahomes’ college career was short. In one pitching appearance, all three batters he faced reached and scored, giving him the dreaded infinite career ERA, and he went 0-for-2 at the plate. Suffice it to say he picked the right sport in the long run.

Brown, the Eagles’ top receiver, was himself a highly touted high school baseball prospect, a 19th-round pick of the Padres in 2016. An outfielder, Brown played in the Under Armour All-Star game alongside Bo Bichette — in 2020 he told Turron Davenport of ESPN that the two still keep in touch — but forfeited his chance to be a two-sport athlete at Ole Miss by signing with the Padres. He played at San Diego’s extended spring training during the college football offseason but never appeared in a competitive minor league game. In February, in the midst of a contract dispute with the Titans, he tweeted about returning to baseball and the Padres. At the time, that looked like a joke or an empty threat made during a negotiation, but in September he told The News Journal of Wilmington, Delaware, that he was completely serious. That story, by Martin Frank, also touches on the baseball-playing histories of Brown’s Eagles teammates Jalen Hurts, DeVonta Smith, and Avonte Maddox. Maddox actually gave football up altogether at one point so he could focus on baseball.

All this is well and good, but remembering some high school baseball players is hardly the basis for an article. So in addition to tossing out some Super Bowl-related content in the hope of attracting a few eyeballs during a slow period for baseball (please like my sport!), there are two larger points I want to make. First, to discuss how their upbringing in baseball impacted Brown and Mahomes as NFL players. And second, to explore the current state of the baseball vs. football divide when the two sports come into competition for athletes.

Whenever Brown talks to reporters about his baseball career, he seems to get asked some version of “What did you learn in baseball that you could apply to football?” And rightly so — it’s an interesting question, and Brown is one of the small handful of people who have played both sports at a high enough level to be able to give a useful answer. Multi-sport athletes always seem to have some muscle or intellectual pathway that doesn’t get awakened in specialists.

For Brown, that manifests in his ability to track a football in flight. “I tell a lot of guys man, you catch the ball with your eyes,” Brown told Davenport in the 2020 ESPN article. “Baseball really helped me out with that for football … On a deep pass in football, you judge it and go track it just like a center fielder.”

Both Hurts and Kyler Murray, two quarterbacks who spend plenty of time outside the pocket, credited baseball with helping them slide. But watching Mahomes, as someone who watches a lot of baseball, the crossover trait is obvious.

Mahomes was a highly-touted pitcher, so you’d think his greatest skill would be his ability to throw the ball far and throw it accurately, both of which he can obviously do. But what makes Mahomes one of the most entertaining athletes in all of sports is not his arm strength or accuracy as such, but his ability to throw the ball accurately from unorthodox positions.

Mahomes is capable of throws — on the run, across his body, against the grain, from weird arm angles — that few quarterbacks before him would even think of attempting. But how many of the ludicrous throwing motions Mahomes pulls off do you see routinely from major league infielders? If an athlete wants to learn to throw a ball accurately on the run, I can’t think of a better way to learn than playing shortstop.

Fortunately, youth sports seem to be trending away from hyper-specialization. College and pro coaches across a variety of sports seem to appreciate the benefits of cross-training not just in terms of learning new skills but in avoiding burnout in young athletes.

Which brings up the ongoing tension between the two sports in competing for the attention of athletes like Brown, Mahomes, Maddox, and countless teenagers across the country every year. Baseball people tend to get snooty whenever this discussion comes up — the refrain is usually something along the lines of “our sport won’t give you brain trauma.”

That is the end of the discussion for many people, both young athletes and their parents. I don’t have children, but if I do someday, they won’t play football. (Though that’ll likely have less to do with concussions than the fact that my family tends to produce people whose athletic gifts are less suited to football than they are to, say, glee club or Model U.N.)

If that sounds like a squishy middle-class liberal position, that’s because it is. It’s easy to stand on the outside and tell other people what to decide for themselves and their children when you don’t have to consider the specifics. I’ve covered the baseball-versus-football debate in some detail over the years. In 2016, for Baseball Prospectus, I wrote about Antwaan Randle El’s admission that the after-effects of the concussions he suffered throughout his career made him wish he’d chosen baseball. (Randle El is now an assistant coach with the Detroit Lions.) Rather than rehash the entire discussion, I’ll simply note the reason Randle El chose football: His parents wanted him to go to college.

College baseball is obviously a big deal on its own, but with 11.7 scholarships available per Division I team, compared to 85 for FBS football, it’s harder for kids who grew up poor to get an education through baseball, if that’s what they’re after. To say nothing of the fact that high school football is available in just about every public school in the country, and colleges scout everywhere. On the other hand, top-level baseball competition and instruction is expensive and exclusive.

Even within football, there’s further selection by class. Quarterback is obviously the most glamorous and lucrative position on the gridiron, and relatively safe compared to other positions. But not everyone can afford to become a high-level quarterback. In a 2021 story in The Athletic, the father of Alabama quarterback Bryce Young estimated that he spent $15,000 per year on his son’s athletic tutelage. They say you have to spend money to make money. That’s not literally true when it comes to raising a first-round quarterback, but having money definitely helps.

Whether it happened intentionally or through societal inertia, football is like the military: A dangerous job that comes with the promise of security and a free education. Kids from wealthier families don’t get recruited as hard, and instead can go play baseball or soccer (which might be in for a head injury reckoning of its own someday) — the equivalent of getting recruited into a white-collar career.

It bears repeating that race and economic class generally intersect in this country in certain patterns. The mechanisms that tend to turn rich kids into quarterbacks and baseball players also tend to turn rich white kids into quarterbacks and baseball players, even after decades of hand-wringing about the issue. Perhaps the more complete way to characterize the selection process is not class sorting, but caste sorting.

Even if a young baseball player goes pro, it’s no guarantee of success. The thankless work, laughable pay, and long odds of success that come with minor league baseball are well-documented. Some seven years removed from his last season of high school baseball, it’s probably too late for Brown to switch sports. (Not that he’d want to, having just broken the Eagles’ single-season receiving yards record, made the Super Bowl, and signed an extension that could be worth up to $100 million.)

But if he’d gone pro in baseball, what are the chances he would’ve made the majors? Even a highly-rated high school draftee faces years’ worth of waiting for a minuscule chance of sticking in the big leagues. This is an argument I expounded on for The Ringer in 2018 when Murray was in the process of backing out of his nascent baseball career.

Baseball has its own physical dangers, but it’s the far safer sport on the whole. Nevertheless, the economic landscape is so badly tilted against young ballplayers — particularly those who didn’t come from money — that many young athletes find football to be worth the risk.

Though to tell the truth, the extent to which sports compete over athletes is probably overstated. What can we learn from Mahomes, Brown, Murray, and the others? Well, for starters, that it’s usually quite obvious which sport said athlete prefers and/or is better at. Certainly by the time college comes around, and usually quite a bit earlier, the right sport will reveal itself.

Every high school class produces hundreds, maybe thousands, of athletes who are capable of playing both baseball and football well at the Division I level. A percentage of those are good enough at both to go pro in either.

But good enough at both to have an equal opportunity to become a star in either? That’s vanishingly rare. Bo Jackson. John Elway, maybe, if he’d given baseball a real shot. Jeff Samardzija was really good at both baseball and football, though perhaps using him as an example strains the definition of “star.” There’s an alternate timeline in which Joe Mauer becomes an NFL quarterback and Tom Brady a major league catcher. (I’m not saying I want to live in the timeline where they swap lives, but I’d like to take a peek over there and see how things are going.) Athletes of that caliber are too rare to turn into models for study. For the overwhelming majority of athletes, the right sport reveals itself.