MMQB: That Time a 17-Year-Old Tom Brady Borrowed Ken Griffey Jr.’s Jersey

[bbobbo]

i've seen stories before of how brady almost became an Expo, but this one goes into more depth on the actual lengths the Expos went through to convince him to sign with them. a nice read.

That Time Tom Brady Borrowed Ken Griffey Jr.’s Jersey | The MMQB with Peter King

some excerpts:

Brady was a legitimate baseball prospect, in part, because of the position he played. He was a catcher who threw with his right hand but batted lefty—a skillset that has become increasingly rare in the modern game. Of the 60 or so starting and backup catchers in baseball today, only a handful of them bat left-handed. Think: Joe Mauer, A.J. Pierzynski, Brian McCann.

Brady had some power, too. He played two years of varsity baseball, 61 games in all, and he batted .311 and had eight home runs, 11 doubles, and 44 RBIs, according to press clippings. Pete Jensen, his high school coach, remembers Brady hitting one monster home run in a playoff game that struck the team bus—parked well beyond the right field fence—and waking the driver who was trying to take a nap.

Behind the plate, Brady was just as adept. He chatted up umpires before games the same way he chats with referees now, presumably hoping that friendly conversation might influence close calls later in the game. Jensen let his catchers call their own games—a luxury many college coaches don’t afford their players—and Brady embraced the challenge. He would meet with pitchers before games and discuss strategy: how they were going to set up hitters and attack their weaknesses. Brady had played against a lot of these hitters in leagues growing up and knew their tendencies. “He had a book in his mind on these guys,” says Jon Chapman, Serra’s ace pitcher that year. “If I tried to shake him off, he’d throw down the same darn sign. It was like, OK, we’ll go with it. Tommy knows what he’s doing.”

Hughes told FP Santangelo, a 27-year-old outfielder, to watch after Brady and chaperone him for the day, because the Expos wanted to sign this guy. But once Santangelo heard that Brady was going to play quarterback at Michigan, it was all he could talk about. Santangelo’s mother had attended Michigan and he’d grown up in the state bleeding maize and blue. At one point, Santangelo took Brady around the clubhouse and introduced him to the guys, including Pedro Martinez, the ace, and Felipe Alou, the manager. “I didn’t even introduce him as, ‘He’s going to sign with the Expos,’ ” Santangelo says. “It was: ‘This is Tom Brady, he plays quarterback at Michigan.’ I do remember that [Brady] was very shy. He was saying, ‘I’m like fifth-string right now, who knows how that’s going to go.’ ”

Other players took an interest, too, and soon Brady was sitting at a locker, holding court with six or seven Expos asking him questions. “We were telling him,” Santangelo says, “ ‘Why would you make $800 a month in the minor leagues when you can be the quarterback at the University of Michigan? You’re a good-looking guy, you can probably have a lot of fun off the field, too.’ … We told him: ‘Go play football at Michigan! Are you kidding me?’ ”

Hughes eventually wandered into the clubhouse and overheard the conversation. Says Santangelo, “He was like, ‘Oh, God, I put him with the wrong guys.’ ”

Some 10 years later, Hughes was at a friend’s house watching the Super Bowl—one of the three that Brady won in a span of four years, from 2001 to ’04—and the magnitude of what he’d done, or rather, had failed to do, dawned on him. “If I could’ve signed this guy, I would’ve changed the entire history of the NFL,” Hughes told his friends. “The NFL would’ve never been the same. Who would’ve known?”

 

[WaterfallJumper]

I love reading about moments like this that may have changed history. Sure, a myriad of other factors probably contributed to Brady choosing Michigan over the Expos, but it's still neat to hear the stories of the people involved.

 

[n1997y]

“[Brady] had a high ceiling,” recalls Kevin Malone, the Expos’ general manager at the time. “He was a left-handed, power-hitting catcher who was cerebral. He had arm strength. He had everything that would warrant him being projected as a major league all-star. He had everything.”

Yep, that's a high ceiling.

 

[RelocatedPatFan]

Rumor has it Peyton Manning is investing into a research group that is developing a time machine.