Patrick Mahomes is in the midst of an MVP-caliber season as the quarterback of the Kansas City Chiefs.
There was a time, however, when Alex Rodriguez tried to steer Mahomes toward baseball — a piece of advice that looks really, really bad in hindsight.
You see, Mahomes’ father, Pat Mahomes, was a major league pitcher from 1992 to 2003. The older Mahomes played alongside Rodriguez with the Texas Rangers in 2001, at which point A-Rod supposedly shared what he believed was a wonderful pearl of wisdom with the younger Mahomes.
“I said, ‘Now listen to me, if you don’t hear one thing that I ever tell you, you better listen to this,’ ” Rodriguez recently recalled to Omnisport, according to Sporting News. ” ‘There is no money, there is no future, there is no history in football. You have to play baseball!’ Well, he reminded me of that recently and, boy, am I glad he did not listen to me!”
Did this really happen? Who knows? After all, Mahomes was just six years old when his dad played alongside Rodriguez in Texas. It’s hard to imagine him putting too much stock into A-Rod’s advice, which actually would have been quite reasonable at the time given Mahomes’ youth and the greater financial security of a typical MLB career versus a typical NFL career.
That said, we all should be glad Mahomes stuck to football despite actually becoming a standout baseball prospect before ultimately choosing a life on the gridiron. He’s already established himself as one of the most exciting players in the NFL in his first season as Kansas City’s starting QB.
