Fans’ interest in Tebow still strong
STRUGGLING MINOR-LEAGUER: His good-guy persona continues to resonate with his supporters
HAGERSTOWN, Md. — After Willy Wonka threw out the first pitch, but before the helicopter flew over Municipal Stadium, dropping candy all over the outfield, Tim Tebow ran out to left field, and his bodyguard followed. And darn it if dozens of fans didn’t gather along picnic tables down the line to watch a 29-year-old man stand in left field, crouch for each pitch, then relax again.
“Go, Tim! Good effort,” one zealot called. Tebow was backing up a single to centre.
Tebow has been part of this country’s sporting conversation for more than a decade, and he has been, at various points, saviour and exile, star and also-ran. And now we’re here, in western Maryland on a hazy and hot Sunday, where Tebow is somehow becoming polarizing all over again.
He’s a Heisman Trophy winner, a former NFL quarterback, an established football analyst for ESPN.
Should he be playing baseball? He’s seven years older than any other outfielder for the Columbia Fireflies. He’s not a real prospect, not at his age, not in the South Atlantic League, where most kids are a year or two removed from the draft, not a year or two removed from the Jets.
Let’s put that aside for a minute. It’s pretty clear there’s something significant going on here.
“When he first went to Florida, there really wasn’t anyone great to look up to as far as an athlete,” said John Marcius, a 20-year-old from suburban Pittsburgh who drove for a one-night, two-game tribute to Tebow.
When Tebow began playing for the Gators as a change-of-pace quarterback in the fall of 2006, Marcius was an impressionable kid looking for a role model. Tebow proved worthy. Marcius admired his faith. He admired his commitment to charity and the less fortunate. He admired the way he interacted with people. “He’s really made a difference in my life.”
Hearing this, it becomes a little more understandable the line outside the ballpark’s closed gates snaked down the street a full hour and 50 minutes before first pitch. When the Fireflies’ parent club, the New York Mets, announced that Tebow would begin his first professional baseball season in Columbia, the Hagerstown Suns, low-Class A affiliate of the Washington Nationals, looked at their schedule, saw their four-game set against to start June and put out on social media that Tebow likely would be here then.
Within 12 hours, they had sold 800 tickets for each of the four games over this weekend.
But the crowd for Suns-Fireflies on Thursday wasn’t driven just by the Thirsty Thursday beer discounts. No, 6,217 came for Tebow. Doesn’t seem like much, really, until you consider before Tebow arrived the Suns were drawing less than a thousand a night. The total of 22,578 fans set a record for a four-game series at this yard — which is 87 years old.
He came into Sunday’s game hitting .219 with three homers and 52 strikeouts in 160 at-bats. A left-handed hitter, he has struggled with left-handed pitching, not a surprise given his last full baseball season was in 2005.
When the game ended, Tebow signed autographs for those fans clamouring for him behind home plate. But a Mets staffer and his own security detail eventually coaxed him out to right field. There stood a few dozen participants in Tebow’s Night to Shine program, a prom experience for kids with special needs put on through Tebow’s foundation.
When Tebow arrived, he embraced anyone who approached. He called people by name.
“Before I have to go,” he said to the group, “can I get some big hugs?”
Think he couldn’t throw a football properly? Think he should give baseball a rest? Talk to the people who made the pilgrimage here, and look at the smiles in right field in the early evening Sunday night before you form your full opinion.