Super Bowl QBs have baseball ties
Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers quarterbacks Patrick Mahomes and Brock Purdy are gearing up for a Super Bowl showdown. Meanwhile, their fathers may be looking ahead to the start of MLB’s spring training this month.
Both Mahomes and Purdy have fathers who once played professional baseball. Pat Mahomes Sr. was a pitcher who played for six MLB teams — the Minnesota Twins, Boston Red Sox, New York Mets, Texas Rangers, Chicago Cubs and Pittsburgh Pirates — over 11 seasons. Shawn Purdy never made it to the majors, but he spent the better part of the 1990s pitching in three teams’ minor league systems: the then-California Angels, San Francisco Giants and Atlanta Braves.
Here’s what to know about Mahomes’ and Purdy’s baseball ties.
Did Mahomes or Purdy play baseball?
Mahomes played on Texas Tech’s baseball team his freshman year of college but eventually quit to focus on football. The Chiefs QB finished his college baseball career without much to show for it, though he was one of the best passers in the school’s football history when he left.
According to MaxPreps, a high school sports coverage website, Purdy only played on his high school’s JV baseball team in the spring of 2016, his sophomore year.
Here are their dads’ professional career stats
In 11 MLB seasons, Pat Mahomes threw 709 innings in 308 games for six teams. He retired with a 42-39 win-loss record, 452 strikeouts and a 5.47 ERA.
Over eight seasons, Shawn Purdy played at four levels of minor league baseball: low Class A, high Class A, Class AA and Class AAA. He pitched 7262⁄3 innings in 267 minor league games, most of which were as a reliever. Purdy ended his career with a 58-37 win-loss record across the minor league levels he played, and he had 451 career strikeouts and a 3.91 career ERA.