Russell Wilson mentioned baseball again, which of course means another round of debating whether or not the Seattle Seahawks quarterback and former Colorado Rockies farmhand would actually ever attempt to juggle two sports professionally.
HBO’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel is airing an interview with Wilson next week, and in a preview released over the weekend, Wilson tells Gumbel, “I never want to kill the dream of playing two sports. I would honestly play two sports.”
Wilson recently made another spring training appearance with the Texas Rangers, the team that currently controls his baseball rights, and when Gumbel asks Wilson what is stopping him from playing two sports, Wilson replies with a chuckle, “I don’t know. I may push the envelope a little bit one of these days.”
If this has you worried as a Seahawks fan, it shouldn’t. Wilson, who spent two seasons playing minor league baseball in 2010 and 2011, very well might believe he can succeed in baseball—he’s a good enough athlete and driven enough that it is feasible he could find success were he to give up football and focus on baseball only—but Wilson is also smart enough to know how bright and lucrative his future is in the NFL.
Wilson isn’t going to walk away from football, and at 26 and four years removed from baseball, he is in no position to actually compete for a Major League roster spot while splitting time between two sports, something an NFL team isn’t going let its franchise quarterback do anyway. It’s one thing for a running back like Bo Jackson or defensive back like Deion Sanders to juggle two sports, but the demands put on a quarterback make it pretty much impossible to add a second job in the offseason to the mix. Wilson right now is leading player workouts in Hawaii, something he organized in Southern California the previous two years. A player as driven as Mr. No Time For Sleep himself isn’t going to be OK with going into an NFL season having not prepared as thoroughly as possible.
Hell, I’d love to be proven wrong. It would be absolutely fascinating to see one of the NFL’s best quarterbacks attempt something so unusual and difficult as juggling a second sport while playing the most important position in his current one; I just don’t see how it possibly makes sense.
If Wilson truly doesn’t care about money—and if that’s the case, why is he on my TV so often pitching American Family Insurance, Microsoft, Alaska Airlines, Braun, Duracell and others?—then maybe he would consider giving up football at some point to give baseball one last chance. But unless Wilson is willing to walk away from nine-figure career earnings, chasing baseball at this point in his life makes no sense. Let’s just say for a second, Wilson decided to give baseball another try. He’s currently 26 years old, and hasn’t played organized baseball since 2011. And back in 2011, Wilson struggled to hit playing for Colorado’s Class A affiliate, posting a .228 average while striking out 82 times in 193 at bats. Again, that was four years ago. In A ball.
And in addition to the fact that it makes little sense for Wilson to pursue baseball at this point, we also don’t know how this interview was edited. After all, HBO’s goal in releasing this clip more than a week before the show airs is to get people to tune in, and the fact that Wilson playing baseball is now a big topic on sports radio this week shows HBO succeeded in getting people talking about its show. For all we know, Wilson might have said, “I would honestly play two sports” then continued with something like, “if it were feasible, which as an NFL quarterback it isn’t, but it’s fun to dream, right?”
Or maybe after Wilson chuckles talking about pushing the envelope, he says something like, “but seriously, my focus is on helping the Seattle Seahawks win another Super Bowl.”
So why is Wilson even talking about this? Most likely, it’s simply because he does still love baseball and the dreamer in him believes he could succeed in that sport, and since Wilson was just at spring training, Gumbel asked the question. Or maybe Wilson and his people think he can gain a bit more leverage in contract negotiations with Seattle by floating the idea of playing another sport. Whatever the motivation for Wilson talking about two sports, “could Russell Wilson play professional baseball?” is a relevant topic to debate; “Will he play professional baseball?” however, is not.
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