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Mets ink Tebow to Minor League deal
- Updated: September 8, 2016
NEW YORK — Ten days from now, Tim Tebow will report to the Mets’ Spring Training complex in Port St. Lucie, Fla., alongside dozens of teenagers, hoping to make a career in professional baseball.
Tebow is not a teenager, but he is a professional baseball player, however unlikely that may once have seemed. The Mets on Thursday signed the 29-year-old former NFL quarterback and Heisman Trophy Award winner to a Minor League contract, the first step in what Tebow hopes will lead to a Major League career.
“I just get to go pursue my passion, do what I love,” Tebow said. “I get to pursue this awesome game of baseball. I’ll give everything I have to it.”
To succeed, Tebow will need to overcome long odds. That process begins Sept. 18 in instructional league, which is typically used for younger players to work on their skills prior to the offseason. If all goes well, Tebow could advance to the Arizona Fall League and winter ball, and eventually to a Minor League affiliate next April. But the Mets are keeping his timeline as fluid as possible, refusing to commit to any singular path.
For now, they are simply enjoying a relationship that, even if all does not go well, they feel can be symbiotic.
“I understand this is not a typical situation,” Mets general manager Sandy Alderson said. “We understand that he hasn’t been around the game for a while. We understand he’s 29 years old. We understand he’s a tremendous competitor and is going to be a tremendous — I think — role model for the players in our system. This is an opportunity to associate with excellence.”
Tebow has not played competitive baseball since 2005, his junior year at Allen D. Nease High School in Ponte Vedra, Fla., where he was a three-sport standout in football, basketball and baseball. Quitting the latter sport to pursue football, Tebow recently said, was the second-hardest decision he’s made in life, …
