Skip to content
Link copied to clipboard

After stint with Eagles, Tim Tebow finds happiness ... in baseball | Mike Sielski

A phone call from Chip Kelly gave Tim Tebow one more shot in the NFL. Now, he’s loving life as a minor-league ballplayer.

Columbia (S.C.) Fireflies' Tim Tebow signs a ball for Tyler Hunt, 9,  from Salisbury before his game with the Delmarva Shorebirds in minor-league baseball at Arthur W. Purdue Stadium in Salisbury, Md .Wednesday, May 10, 2017.
Columbia (S.C.) Fireflies' Tim Tebow signs a ball for Tyler Hunt, 9, from Salisbury before his game with the Delmarva Shorebirds in minor-league baseball at Arthur W. Purdue Stadium in Salisbury, Md .Wednesday, May 10, 2017.Read moreSTEVEN M. FALK / Staff Photographer

SALISBURY, Md. - In March 2015, Tim Tebow was on a well-hidden baseball field in Boca Raton, Fla., awaiting his fifth at-bat during a clandestine workout to see if he really could play pro ball even at its lowest levels, when one of his brothers took a phone call for him. It was the Eagles. Tebow hadn't appeared in a regular-season NFL game in more than two years. He was working for ESPN. He had begun, according to a recent Sports Illustrated article, his "post-football life." Chip Kelly didn't care. He was giving Tebow a chance to earn a backup quarterback spot on the Eagles' roster.

"To be honest, I was torn," Tebow said. "In that day, I was like, 'Man, this is fun. I really like doing this. This is fun. I think I can do this.' And it was, like, back and forth. And honestly, through that time, I was very, very torn, and I think one of the reasons was because of Chip Kelly, how innovative he was. It was because of the offense, how well I thought I could fit in that offense. That was a lot of incentive to me as well."

Tebow, of course, signed a one-year contract with the Eagles the following month, only to have them cut him at the end of training camp, and the only lasting significance of his time with the team is that it delayed the journey he has embarked on this spring. On Wednesday night, here at Arthur W. Perdue Stadium, Tebow batted sixth and was the designated hitter for the Columbia Fireflies in a South Atlantic League game against the Delmarva Shorebirds. It was his 28th game this season for the Fireflies, a Class A affiliate of the New York Mets, in an endeavor that is either romantic or self-indulgent, depending primarily - well, no, entirely - on your view of Tebow.

It's easy to find romance in a minor-league baseball stadium, especially this one, which features a children's carousel, with a yellow-and-blue canopy, set on a grassy hill behind third base. That extended tryout with the Eagles was Tebow's last chance to stick in the NFL, and once it fell through it freed him to pursue the other sport that he'd played as a kid and that, even as a folk hero/lightning rod throughout his football career, was never far from his mind.

"I had those thoughts even in Denver and with the Jets, because I always loved it," he said. "It was fun. I had those thoughts, but when I was in Philly I was still fully focused on playing."

Now, he's a super-small-market version of who he used to be, riding the team bus 515 miles and for more than eight hours from central South Carolina to get here Tuesday, staying at a Sleep Inn a mile and a half from the ballpark, shopping at a nearby Food Lion with some teammates for some late-night snacks. "I haven't found this to be a circus yet," he said before Wednesday's game, a 7-1 Columbia victory, and at that point he wouldn't have. Those were customary aspects of life for a guy in the low minors.

What isn't customary is that a Class A team would hold a media availability for one player, or that the availability would be limited to 10 minutes, or that the home franchise would prohibit photographers from standing on or near the playing field before or during a game. What isn't customary is the local sheriff's office supplying additional manpower to patrol the bleachers, just to be sure. What isn't customary is what happened during Tebow's first at-bat: a TV news helicopter idling low in the sky beyond the center field fence, its cameras presumably zooming in on him.

He went 2 for 5 on Wednesday, lifting his batting average to .250, and the helicopter was gone by the top of the sixth inning, when he lined a bases-loaded double to right field to drive in two runs, giving him a .700 OPS and 11 RBI in 100 at-bats this season. He is 29, six years older than any other player on the Fireflies' roster, and he had not played baseball since high school, yet he is not embarrassing himself. Is he great? No. So?

"Baseball's such a dynamic type of sport," said Delmarva manager Ryan Minor, a former two-sport athlete who played 142 major-league games and was a second-round draft pick of the 76ers in 1996. "You can be the best athlete in the world and still fail. There are so many little factors. Trying to hit a baseball is one of the hardest things to do in any sport, if not the hardest. But for him to be away from it for that long and be able to step in and be competitive in what he's doing so far, it's just a credit to his ability to make adjustments. I think a lot of that comes from being the kind of football player he was and athlete. He's got some mental strength that helps him."

He signed autographs - several baseballs, a blue Florida Gators jersey, an orange Gators helmet - and sang the national anthem out loud and appears genuinely to savor the entire experience - the challenge, the competition, feeding that furnace within every elite athlete. It's difficult to see any self-indulgence. There's no reality TV crew tracking him, no hell-raising in these tiny towns ("Food Lion was a little bit hectic," he said), no apparent resentment from his teammates and competitors toward a celebrity who maybe stole an opportunity from someone who had paid more dues.

"These guys are professional athletes, too," Minor said, "but being on the same field as a Heisman Trophy winner, a first-round pick, a guy who played in the NFL, all the playoff stuff he did, being such a high-profile guy, I think some of the guys, at first, were in awe, including myself. To look over there and say, 'I watched that guy on TV,' and to be able to do what he's doing at this level gives you a certain sense of admiration."

It gives Tebow, it seems, a sense of satisfaction. Someone asked him what he would doing Labor Day weekend, whether he'd be in an ESPN studio, analyzing the first college football games of 2017, or in Rome, Ga., for the Fireflies' final series of the season. "I'll be playing baseball here with our guys," he said. Maybe Tim Tebow's only regret is that a phone call from an unconventional coach and a few months in Philadelphia kept him from having this kind of fun sooner.

msielski@phillynews.com

@MikeSielski