Did tom brady play baseball? A great quarterback, Tom Brady ‘was a really good receiver’

Did tom brady play baseball? Tom Brady, widely considered the greatest football player of all-time, is once again retiring. He announced his retirement last year only to return a few weeks later, though this time Brady says it’s “for good.” He retires with seven Super Bowl rings (more than any single franchise), five Super Bowl MVPs, and as the NFL’s all-time leader in passing yards (89,214) and touchdowns (649).

Like many others, Brady played multiple sports in high school, including baseball. He was a left-handed hitting catcher at Junípero Serra High School in San Mateo, California, and he was good enough that he was selected by the Montreal Expos in the 18th round of the 1995 Major League Baseball Draft. Brady of course gave up baseball to play football at Michigan, though he was a gifted baseball player.

How does Brady think things would have played out had he stuck to baseball? “I’d be selling insurance, man. Baseball was not my sport,” he said on the Dan Patrick Show last June. There was definitely juice in Brady’s bat though. He wrapped a home run around the Pesky Pole at Fenway Park in 2003

In addition to all his football accolades, Brady will go down as the last active professional athlete to be drafted by the Expos. The last before him was Ian Desmond, who was drafted by the Expos in 2004 but didn’t make his MLB debut until 2009, well after the team relocated and became the Washington Nationals. Like Brady, Desmond never actually played for the Expos.

And just in case you’re curious, Brady is a free agent and would be able to sign with any team if he decided to give baseball another try. The Expos/Nationals no longer control his baseball rights. He’s technically an undrafted free agent after exhausting his college eligibility and going undrafted out of Michigan. Lefty-hitting catchers are in short supply. Anyone interested?

did tom brady play baseball

Tom Brady, drafted by Montreal Expos, ‘could’ve been one of the greatest catchers ever’

Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady greeted New York Yankees slugger Aaron Judge in the tunnel of Raymond James Stadium ahead of a December game.

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“Do you want to play tight end for us tonight?” Brady jokingly asked Judge at the time.

But some think it could have been the other way around. Brady retired on Wednesday as the greatest football player of all time. But could Brady have been a baseball great?

Kevin Malone, a former baseball general manager for the Montreal Expos and Los Angeles Dodgers, told Bleacher Report that Brady “could have been one of the greatest catchers ever.” There was one catch. “His first love was football,” Malone said.

That didn’t stop Malone from drafting the left-handed hitting catcher out of Junipero Serra High School in San Mateo, California with the 507th overall pick of the MLB draft in 1995.

Did Tom Brady play baseball in high school?

Brady was a three-sport athlete at Junipero Serra High, playing football, baseball and basketball.

Brady made the “difficult transition” from first baseman to catcher his senior year, according to a San Francisco Examiner article published in 1995. He used his left-hitting power to work his way up to No. 5 in the batting order.

“You’ve got to give Tommy a lot of credit,” coach Pete Jensen told the Examiner at the time. “He really struggled in the first half of the season. He just couldn’t buy a hit. He was below .200 for a while. But he’s really come back.”

Did Brady get drafted in the MLB?

Yes. Brady was drafted in the 18th round of the 1995 MLB Draft by the Montreal Expos. Former Expos scout John Hughes says the club offered Brady in the “neighborhood of bottom of the second (round), top of the third type money” to lure him to the baseball diamond.

“If we were going to offer him that type of money, we felt he was going to be a future big-leaguer,” Hughes told Sports Illustrated in 2017.

Could Tom Brady have succeeded in MLB?

Scouts seem to think so.

“He was a very athletic young man. A big kid who had a great face, a major league face. Yes, we looked at the face,” Malone told Bleacher Report. “He had an athletic, strong body, but there was room for development. As a scout, one of the first things you look at is just the body — the type of body, the athleticism and what kind of face does he have. I know that sounds a little strange.”

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Hughes said Brady “had all the intangibles” to be a pro: “He could throw, left-handed power. There is no reason to think this guy couldn’t have been a big-league catcher.”

Is Tom Brady glad he selected football over baseball?

If his soon-to-be Hall of Fame career isn’t enough to convince you he made the right choice, take his word for it. He shared a throwback baseball card on Facebook in 2016.

“I was fortunate to be selected by the Expos in the 1995 MLB Draft,” Brady captioned the photo. “But … I’m so happy I stuck with football!”

A great quarterback, Tom Brady ‘was a really good receiver’

Tom Brady, the quarterback who has played in more Super Bowls — and won more — than any player in history, went to the same high school — Junipero Serra in San Mateo, Calif. — as Barry Bonds, who hit more home runs than any player in baseball history. Brady was there about 10 years after Bonds, and he also played baseball at the school that was commonly known as Serra.

The school has been renamed Canyon Hills. But when it was still Serra, and Brady was the left-handed-hitting catcher on the baseball team, he was a good enough ballplayer to be drafted by the Montreal Expos in the 18th round of the 1995 MLB Draft.

The Expos’ Northern California area scout at the time was John Hughes, who’s now with the Oakland A’s.

“I’d actually gone to Serra to look at one of Tom’s teammates,” Hughes said on Wednesday. “But then there’s this left-handed-hitting catcher with power, and who could really throw. I called Jim Fleming, my West Coast supervisor, and said, ‘You need to come and see this guy.’”

Fleming did. Hughes wrote up his final report on Brady in the world before computers, made three copies and sent it out in the mail, certain the Expos were going to draft Tom Brady, even if it meant drafting him late.

By then, Dave Littlefield, a scout with the Tigers now, had come to Serra High School to see Brady for himself. He described his job with the Expos in those days as “national cross-checker.”

“I was like the national sales rep,” Littlefield said with a laugh Wednesday morning, after finding out the way we all did that Brady had announced his retirement “for good” from pro football after one of the greatest careers in the history of American sports.

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But back in 1995, when the Expos were only seeing the left-handed-hitting high school catcher, Littlefield had seen everything with his own eyes that Hughes had. I asked him, nearly 30 years later, what he remembered best about the 18-year-old the Expos had taken in the 18th round.

“Tall, good-looking kid, good-looking hitter, too,” Littlefield said.

Then he paused and said, “The arm worked pretty well, as you might imagine.”

Hughes and Littlefield knew a bit about Serra’s history with high-profile athletes. In addition to Bonds, Lynn Swann, the Steelers’ Hall of Fame wide receiver, had gone there.

“All in all, we were aware that when it came to sports, this was a high-end high school,” Littlefield said. “We were also very well aware that the kid had been offered a scholarship to play quarterback at Michigan.”

The Giants were still playing at Candlestick Park in ‘95. After the Draft, Brady was offered the chance to come to Candlestick and work out. He dressed in the Expos’ clubhouse, then took batting practice on the field long before the Giants were out for early batting practice on a miserably cold Candlestick night, before going through some defensive drills.

“The [Expos] players I knew best at that time were Rondell White and F.P. Santangelo,” Hughes said. “After the workout, they were talking to Tom in front of a locker where he was sitting. Something I’ll never forget? The way they were reacting to him, like he was the one commanding the room. He was the most impressive high school kid, off the field, I’d ever met. Even then, he had this amazing presence.

“Rondell finally asked him about football. Tom told him about Michigan. Rondell said, You’ve got a scholarship to play where? Go to school, kid!’ I remember saying to Kevin Malone, the Expos’ GM, ‘Not sure our guys are really helping us here.’”

did tom brady play baseball

MLB Franchise That Drafted Tom Brady Reacts to His Retirement

But, before committing to a football career, Brady once considered a career in baseball. He was drafted in the 18th round of the 1995 MLB draft as a catcher by the Montreal Expos, who relocated to Washington in 2004 and became the Nationals.

Obviously, Brady decided not to continue a career in baseball and instead committed to Michigan for college football. After seven Super Bowl titles and myriad NFL records, the rest is history.

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